


less than a drop

by futuredescending



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Clones, M/M, Mental Instability, Orphan Black inspiration here we come, gratuitous 'once and future king' references, lord I love me my sci-fi, some Caprica homage, some minor epistolary things because WHY NOT, some people maybe not as dead as previously assumed, suicide in first chapter only
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-07-11 09:42:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 53,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7042987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The other man must feel the weight of his stare, which goes on for longer than it generally would have, because he turns to look at Eggsy, and time stops.</p><p>Eggsy doesn’t make a habit of studying himself extensively in the mirror, but he can recognise his own face staring back at him well enough, and the effect is disorienting. For one hysterical moment, he has to wonder if <em>he</em> really exists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, here is another thing, sort of experimental-ish, heavily inspired by _Orphan Black_ , and if you've seen the first episode, then you may have an idea of what happens in this here first chapter, so for that, I apologize in advance D:
> 
> P.S. Check out this gorgeous artwork cover [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8337289) by TheBlueMenace. It's totally RAD!

 

_The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop..._

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_I don’t know why I keep insisting on writing these letters. Once put to paper, these words will only remain obscured behind other words, most likely long after your time is past. Mine too, for that matter._

_But isn’t it just so with everyday human interactions? They constantly speak words at each other in order to mask all the things they really mean to say. I confess sometimes when you are reading to me and you happen to glance up from the page to catch me staring, you are doing likewise, like we are both complicit in this silent game together. You hold my gaze too long even as you continue to speak, but then, you have all the words nearly memorised by heart now, don’t you?_

_‘By heart’. Isn’t that a funny phrase. And yet how often the heart is a synecdoche for all human experience. In this case: an intentionally stored memory that is motivated by a desire to preserve. I, too, have this memory down by heart._

_I can already see you rolling your eyes. You always warned me I was too human._

_To which I have always replied, ‘I am as human as you.’_

_With Kind Regards,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

Later, Eggsy would admit that boosting a car in front of a cop hadn’t been one of his brighter moments.

To be fair, he hadn’t actually known the plainclothes-wearing bloke with the atrocious hair was a cop until the whole shouted “Stop! Police!” bit, and by then it was too late: he already had the door open and was sitting behind the wheel while the engine had begun to purr delightfully from an expert hot wiring (if he did say so himself). Perhaps if he hadn’t been so fucking talented at breaking into said car, the copper would have cottoned on to his intentions sooner and hence tipped him off sooner before the real damage could be done.

Now there was nothing for it: it was either step on the gas or give up the next few years of his life to the nick, and Eggsy wasn’t a quitter.

Well, he wasn’t a quitter about the things he actually cared about, so you can shut up about his disappointing academic underperformance, Mr Thompson.

He cares about this car, though. It’s a beauty, all sleek sporty lines and high horsepower that’s completely wasted on the city of London and its speed restrictions. Eggsy personally resents any posh prick who buys a beautiful, expensive car and never actually leverages its full potential. He’d wager everything he had that the tosser had never taken her out of the city at all. The way he sees it, he’s just treating a very fine car in the manner deserving of its station.

That, and...it’s just that sometimes, Eggsy has these _moments_ when his desire for something strikes with the random impact of a heart attack, and he’s compelled to simply do the thing. Some might call them impulsive fits of reckless self-destruction. He’d prefer to frame them as just trying to have a bit of fun every once in awhile, seeing as there are so few things in his life to be happy about (no job, no money, no girlfriend—or boyfriend, for that matter, because that turned out to be a thing—just an adorable baby sister, a sad mother, and a bastard stepfather).

As the car laps the narrow roads, which, at this hour, are mercifully empty, his fleeting illicit-induced euphoria is soon dragged back down to earth by a trailing entourage of candy cars behind him, lights blazing and klaxons blaring. Fuck.

Evasive manoeuvres it is, then.

He makes a sharp turn down a one way road in a shriek of tires against blacktop, very much heading down the wrong way, and the police are helpless to follow. He also can’t help but admire how the car handles so wonderfully, leaping to his touch at the slightest command like a mechanical extension of himself and hugging curves like it had been shaped for them when he’s got to dodge an oncoming car by driving up on the pavement. Better still, the cops don’t have the same agility and with one little stunt, Eggsy leaves them in the figurative dust.

His mobile vibrates in his pocket. Eggsy pulls it out to glance at the screen, remembering all over again that he’s _got_ to change the contact info from the time he left his phone on the table with his mates when he went to the loo.

**Eggsy Mum is Well Fit:**  
_Daisy just used last nappy. Can you get sum more?_

_Yea_ he starts to type, but more flashing blue lights blinding him in the rear view mirror draw his attention from his phone.

_May be a bit late tho sorry xx_

Yeah, he shouldn’t be texting and driving, but that’s pretty much the least of his offences at the moment. He’s about to put his phone away when Jamal fucking texts him next.

**Jazza:**  
_Where u at cuz? We at bp. Come out!_

_Trying but bit tied up at mo. Btw wots best way to shake cops?_

_Wtf mate_  
_..._  
_Again??_

Jamal must be with Ryan because the next thing he knows Ryan’s texting him too.

**Stop Tryna Pull Me Mum Ryan:**  
_Srsly??? EGGS Y!!  
What kind?_

Eggsy is in the middle of typing out a reply when he glances up and his eyes widen at the rangy four-legged creature standing in the middle of the road. Instinctively, he jerks the wheel and the car swerves sharply to the right, fishtailing out from under his control until it’s caught in a circular spin, coming to a stop when it crashes into the side of a building.

The impact is harder than he expects. The entire passenger side crumples inwards with a pop and shattering of glass as if the car were little more than a tin can. He remains still, stunned by the entire last two seconds, but then the continued wail of the police sirens startles him out of his daze and into a renewed panic. Eggsy frantically unbuckles his seatbelt and scrambles out of the car on wobbly legs. It takes him a moment to find his footing, and surely there will be some new aches and pains tomorrow, but adrenaline gives him a burst of strength and he’s off down the alley way, leaping up onto a skip and climbing up the ladder escape like the most nimble of primates. He clears the roof of the three story building just as the police come around the corner, but doesn’t stick around to watch. That would be a fool’s errand.

Higher up, he can see the bright lights of London scattered around him like the stars were pulled underneath the thick, cloudy sky. The next building over isn’t too far away, and with a running leap and more than a bit of daring, Eggsy clears the gap easily. The wind lashes at his face with a hint of moisture in it, promising later rain. Eggsy laughs into it. He feels alive like this. Larger than himself and immense. He feels free. 

When he judges the amount of distance he’s put between himself and the scene of the, well, he prefers to call it _incident_ , to be adequate, he reluctantly descends back to street level. His feet hit the solid pavement. He adjusts the angle of his hat, stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and strides away at a casually loping pace. Just another late night pedestrian on the streets trying to go home, whatever that may be. Nothing to see here.

The longer he walks, the safer it becomes, and the more giddy he gets from the high of having gotten away with it. It’s like when he took that leap through the air, he never came down.

It may just be why he keeps tempting fate.

Dodged another bullet today, Unwin.

Eggsy hops the turnstiles at Holborn when no one’s looking and takes the stairs down the escalator two at a time. The platform is practically barren save for a ragged shape of a homeless man curled up in a corner, hunkered down for the night.

As a low grumble signals the impending approach of the last train, he pulls out his phone to send another text to Jamal inquiring as to his whereabouts when a flash of movement from the corner of his eye draws his attention.

It’s just an idle glance to the newcomer at first, a quick look that still takes in enough to know that the man is about his age and about his height, neatly styled hair, wearing a long and dark navy coat that is more suitable for the cool evening than Eggsy’s own threadbare jacket, and in possession of a bearing that Eggsy can only think of as sophisticated. There are just some people who face the world while standing tall. In response, Eggsy hunches in on himself even more.

The other man must feel the weight of his stare, which goes on for longer than it generally would have, because he turns to look at Eggsy, and time stops.

Eggsy doesn’t make a habit of studying himself extensively in the mirror. He’s never found anything particularly distinctive about his features, though he knows from others’ responses that he isn’t unattractive. But he can recognise his own face staring back at him well enough, and the effect is disorienting.

For one hysterical moment, he has to wonder if _he_ really exists.

It’s not so much like looking into a mirror as it is like looking into an alternate reality, one where he can afford an expensive haircut, a good-quality coat, and stylish glasses. One where his reddened eyes shine with unshed tears and utter misery.

Eggsy watches the other man with his face flow through a series of motions like he’s in a dream: approaching the edge of the platform, peeling off the various posh accessories he wears, and slipping them into his coat pockets before unbuttoning the whole thing and shrugging it off, letting it pool at his feet. He wears such an excellently cut suit that Eggsy can tell is expensive and tailored even if he knows fuck all about fashion. But more disconcerting is how Eggsy can recognise the body that the suit highlights, its proportions and angles. He knows it as if it were his own.

The man with his face looks at him again, and Eggsy also recognises the weariness in his expression. It’s the look he sometimes sees when he does take the rare opportunity to study himself in the mirror (be it his own or some random hookup’s) on mornings after long, drunken nights out. It’s the look he has when he contemplates all the medicine bottles lined up in the cabinet behind said mirror and, for a split second, thinks, _maybe it’d be better_.

The lights from the train grow brighter. Eggsy takes a small step forward, hesitant at first, and then urgently breaks out into a run as his gut fills with dread. He opens his mouth to shout, but he’s already too late.

The man with his face keeps staring at him, right until the moment he lets himself fall backwards onto the tracks, disappearing beneath the wheels of the train, and Eggsy’s screams are lost beneath the blaring horns and screeching metal.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_Every time we hear about another one, you like to say, ‘People commit suicide through weakness, not through strength.’ I think you are just too fond of that book. But you get so disgusted every time another fails whatever private standard you’ve held them to, and yet I don’t get the feeling your contempt is for them, but rather yourself. As if you were responsible._

_Is it hubris or kindness to shoulder the entirety of the blame? We share many of the same parts. Maybe we are all responsible. You could not have stopped this any more than I, but you never lay the fault at my feet._

_I never feel the same frustration or guilt as you do, though arguably I ought to feel them even more keenly. I don’t know why. Sometimes I like to think if they suffered so horribly in life, then may the find their solace in the great deep sooner rather than later. Sometimes I wonder if they weren’t the lucky ones all along._

_Kind Regards and Still Going Strong for You,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

Eggsy reels back, repulsed by the very thing he’s just witnessed. He thinks he can see the glint of blood between the wheels of the train. Blood rushes in his ears. He bends in on himself, nearly overcome by the urge to vomit.

The doors to the carriages don’t open. Behind them, Eggsy blearily makes out confused and concerned faces of the train’s passengers. Time, which had moved all too quickly only moments before, now comes to another standstill. The overhead announcement comes on, alerting personnel as to an emergency. Soon, they will descend upon the train like swarming ants.

He takes another step back and nearly trips over the stranger’s coat still bunched up on the ground. He doesn’t know what compels him to scoop it up, sliding into it like a second skin as he turns and starts walking swiftly away. It’s another one of those urges that make him act before he can think.

The coat fits him perfectly like it was made for him. He buttons it closed and runs up the escalator, two, three stairs at a time, only slowing down and adopting an air of normalcy as a horde of Underground workers stream down the opposite stairs. He quickly pulls off his snapback and keeps his head bowed as the police descend soon after. No one even looks at him. They see his expensive coat, and their eyes just slide right over him by habit. Another domain of the rich.

Eggsy keeps walking at a stately pace, like the coat lends him some of its prior owner’s elegance, until he reaches the end of the block, and then it all falls apart.

The world begins to blur around him. The pressure in his chest seems to swell. He feels like his heart is going to explode. His hands cover his mouth as his composure crumbles. He keeps trying to take deep breaths like he’d been taught.

His phone vibrates again in his pocket.

Finding something solid to latch onto, Eggsy hastily unbuttons the coat and digs through his pockets to retrieve his phone.

**Jazza:**  
_Still waiting cuz. Ry’s tryna pull this pensioner he thinks is lot younger. Beer goggles. Funny as shit. Cmon!_

He can’t help laughing a bit too hysterically. Jamal, bless him. His hands are trembling, but he manages to type in a reply anyway.

_Tell him if he snogs her and she got loose teeth they prolly false yeah? Be there soon then x_

He slides the phone back into his pocket and pulls the coat in close around him, taking a deep, steadying breath of the cool night air and inadvertently gets a whiff of the stranger’s cologne. It’s nice. Smells like something light and green and earthy. Not overbearing at all. It’s something he’d choose to wear for himself.

 

_____

 

The Black Prince is practically warm and welcoming, nearly full to bursting, by the time Eggsy arrives. He had taken a cab because the stranger’s wallet had been full of more money than he’d ever seen in his life. He had felt a moment of guilt in using that money, but it wasn’t like the stranger was going to miss it now.

Eggsy welcomes the crowd he pushes through. He just wants to be around people right now and soak in their liveliness.

“Oi, there he is!” Ryan calls out, prompting both him and Jamal to throw their hands up in the air when they spot him like a bunch of hooligans.

Eggsy can’t help but grin back, and right away, Jamal and Ryan sense something false in it.

“Uh oh, what’s that?” Jamal says, giving Eggsy a one-armed hug that draws his attention to the coat. “And what’s this? You rolled over a banker or summat?”

“I think I’m in a spot of trouble,” Eggsy tells him as he slides into the booth.

“Shit, Eggs. What you done now?”

So Eggsy tells them. The car, the crash, the fleeing on foot, the station, the man who jumped in front of the train right before his eyes.

Jamal swallows but gives him a sympathetic look.

Ryan whistles lowly before moving to stand up. “That’s pretty rough, mate. No wonder you look like you seen a ghost. Get this one a drink, yeah? He gonna need it.”

“Cheers.”

“So you gone and steal his coat and things?” Jamal questions, giving him a weird look, like what he done was too much, even for him. “Eggs, they use that sort of stuff for identification. Why?”

“I…” Eggsy tries and fails to justify himself. He hadn’t mentioned the man could be his doppelganger for fear of it coming off as some long lost twins parted at birth shit that’s been ripped from the tabloids. There are plenty of photos of him as a baby, and he never had a twin in any of them, ever. “Dunno. Before he done it, the man just looked at me, you know? Just kept staring like he wanted me to watch and understand. I just wanted to know why he did it.”

When he closes his eyes, he can still picture the other man. His face. His defeat. His sadness. Eggsy tries to put himself in the other man’s shoes (the crazed part of his brain notes that they would have fit, perfectly). Imagines looking at himself as he leans back, back, back, past the point of no return as the wheels of the train come bearing down—

Eggsy gasps as his eyes fly open. 

“You alright?” Jamal warily asks.

“Yeah,” Eggsy shakily says. “Yeah, just a bit shook up.”

When Ryan returns with pints in hand (and striking out on his second attempt in trying to chat up the pensioner), Eggsy pulls out all the things in the stranger’s coat pockets, laying them out on the sticky table: a fancy, surprisingly heavy watch, his thick-rimmed glasses, a gold signet ring, a gold plated lighter, and a fountain pen. Upon second glance at the wallet, Eggsy realises that all it contains is cash—no credit cards or bank cards or even any form of identification.

“Who the fuck was this bloke?” Ryan asks, voicing the question they all have. 

“Oi, look here,” Jamal says, pointing at a small emboss on the leather wallet in the corner.

It’s a strange little logo as far as logos go, sort of looking like the notch of two hills within a circle. Eggsy wouldn’t think much of it except he finds the same small logo in gold on one of the arms of the glasses, on the underside of the lighter, the clip of the pen, the inside of the watch, and hidden behind the face of the ring.

“Someone’s a loyal customer,” Ryan remarks.

Moving on instinct, Eggsy shrugs off the coat and peers at the tag. Same logo, with the fortunate addition of an accompanying name: Kingsman. He shows it to his mates, and Jamal arches a brow before googling it on his phone and showing them. “Some fancy tailor shop, looks like.”

“Maybe they’d recognise him if you described the bloke to them, Eggs,” Ryan suggests.

But Eggsy doesn’t need to. He could just walk right into the shop on Savile Row, and if the bloke were as frequent a visitor to it as all his stuff would indicate, they’d recognise him for someone he wasn’t. At least he’d find out the bloke’s name and if he were lucky, perhaps a little bit more. Then he could tell them what really happened, apologise for taking the bloke’s stuff, and pray they didn’t phone the police.

It’s as good a plan as he’s ever going to have, because he hasn’t a clue as to what the fuck is going on.


	2. Chapter 2

_Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls, what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves._

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_Alright, I have one: He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind._

_See? I have been reading too. But I find such words especially troubling in these last few weeks because they do not appear to have any relevance to our current circumstances. I do not see bravery or kindness. I only see a world in which cruelty only begets more cruelty._

_I have witnessed smugglers dump a boat of refugees into the middle of the ocean after taking their money in order to save themselves the burden of having to shuttle them to safety. Their bodies eventually wash up onto some distant shore, some difficult to identify, half eaten by sea creatures. Their relatives will never know what has happened to them._

_Humans like to hurt those who are weaker than them. Those who cannot protect themselves. Women and children. Anyone who appears different. They make them feel like they are less. They try to extinguish their light. Why do we do this to each other?_

_I confess lately the job has been getting the better of me._

_Pay me no mind. It’s just a moment of weakness on my part. I’ll be better tomorrow. I promise._

_Yours Most Faithfully,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

Eggsy walks past the Kingsman storefront about five times before he musters the courage to go in. He debated wearing the coat too, but the whole situation is already weird and fucked up enough, so instead he just bunches it up in a way it probably doesn’t deserve and stuffs it under his arm.

The interior of the shop hovers somewhere between a gentleman’s club (more of the boring, old-timey and less of the fun sort) and a utilitarian fabric store. It’s small and narrow, heavy on the wood panelling, with few actual offerings on display in favour of lending more room to stately leather-upholstered chairs and marble-topped tables bearing decanters of booze. Scents of leather, wood varnish, and bergamot wash over him, all adding up to an impression that was old, traditional, and masculine.

The store is also empty. There’s a relaxed atmosphere that makes Eggsy think it’s a common occurrence. In fact, the only other occupant being the white-haired man behind the back counter who gives him a look that he can’t determine is friendly or merely polite.

Before he can approach the counter and sheepishly give up his burden, the front door behind him swings open again.

“Ah, Galahad, just the handsome face I wouldn’t mind joining me on the commute. Been out on assignment again, have you? Where did they dig those clothes up? And the butcher job they did on your hair! Let me guess: human trafficking victim? Well, nothing for it. We live to serve queen and country, etcetera, etcetera.” It’s a veritable rambling stream of words that drop from the newcomer’s mouth like a loosened spigot as he lays a heavy hand upon Eggsy’s shoulder guides him further into the store towards one of the closed wooden doors.

His new companion is tall; his clothes speak to his wealth if in a more colourful palette. He has a handsome, congenial face that is only lightly touched by the effects of middle age, and his deep voice lilts with heavy sardonicism, as if he only half-believes whatever he is saying and fully expects his listeners to do the same. “I’ve just finished up in Slovenia myself. Hoping for a day or two off to see how Lancelot is doing. I’ve completely missed the completion of her first assignment. Some mentor I am turning out to be, right?”

It doesn’t seem the other man needs Eggsy to hold up his side of the conversation, which is fortunate, because Eggsy finds himself simply staring wide eyed and speechless, caught between the automatic guilt of being mistaken for someone else and the sheer curiosity of everything the man alludes to. Galahad? Lancelot? What sort of bloody game is this?

But when the man opens the door for him, Eggsy steps inside to find himself in little more than a dressing room. Spacious, certainly, with a burnished three-panel mirror and another upholstered chair and side table in one corner. Even more strangely, the man follows him in and shuts the door behind him.

Eggsy turns to him, lips parted to ask just what the man thought he was doing, when he sees how the man is giving him an expectant look. “Well?”

Eggsy stares at him, fully expecting to be called out for the imposter he is, when the other man merely sighs and rolls his eyes. His panic quickly turns into confusion when the man leans forward and raises his palm to the mirror, splaying it flat across the glass surface.

At first, nothing happens, and Eggsy is about to ask if this is all some sort of joke, but then there’s a faint groaning and clanking sound from underfoot, like ungreased gears have been recalled into service, and the entire room jerks and slowly begins to descend, mirror, furniture and all.

“Holy fuck,” Eggsy says before he can think to shut his mouth.

The man looks over at him quizzically. “Pardon?”

“Uh….” And then, because Eggsy is pretty certain this Galahad bloke is just as much of a toff as the rest of them, he tries on his posh twat accent, wrestling his consonants back under his thick tongue. “Something I had at breakfast seems to disagree with me.”

His gamble seems to pay off when the other man doesn’t appear particularly alarmed. “You _do_ seem a little off your game. Well, if you feel the urge to vomit on the train, I’d ask that you kindly turn away from my shoes. And if it develops into something more serious, don’t tell Medical until you have a better handle on it, alright?”

“I’ll, um, try,” Eggsy says, having to consciously smooth out his furrowed brows before snapping his mouth shut. He vows to keep it that way for the time being.

Whatever mechanism is being used to lower the room trundles along slowly, and with each tedious metre (how fucking deep does this thing go?), it occurs to Eggsy, more and more, that maybe it isn’t such a good idea to pretend to be someone else with a funny name who apparently regularly descends into the bowels of the earth via secret mirror scanner in a tailor shop dressing room.

He’s about to turn to his inadvertent companion to confess all when the lift jerks to a stop and Eggsy barely manages to restrain himself from cursing in shock again. The _train_ in question is some sort of capsule like thingy that reminds Eggsy of old films that showed messages being zipped about offices in cylindrical containers through tubes.

This one, though, has got room for four seats, and Eggsy has no choice but to follow his companion’s example, claiming the seat diagonal so that he doesn’t have to look him in the eye for however long this trip is going to take, to fuck all knows where. The door to the capsule closes in a hiss of controlled air, and Eggsy only has a split second of warning to grip the armrests for dear life before they’re shooting off at high velocity.

The train is remarkably quiet and smooth. He’d have wondered if they were even moving at all were it not for the subtle tug of force on his body and the way he would catch the occasional flashing light or panel through the small windows of their compartment. For the most part, his companion seems bored by the whole thing.

The man narrows his eyes at Eggsy in scrutiny. “Remember, head, turn away.”

Eggsy swallows, trying not to squirm. “Yes, of course.”

“So what was your mission anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a getup quite like yours.”

“Not talking about it.” Eggsy scowls. There’s nothing wrong with his clothes, alright?

“That bad, eh? Oh, fine. You’re too much a stickler for the rules, sometimes.”

Silence descends once more, but Eggsy finds himself living in fear of another question he can’t answer, so he asks, instead, “And Slovenia?” and that’s all that’s needed for his companion to fill the air with a long, unending monologue of his adventures.

Except, from the way the man describes it, it hadn’t been a lighthearted adventure but some heavy spy shit about assassinating some bloke who was staging a coup, what the fuck.

After perhaps twenty minutes, the train comes to a stop as abruptly as it had started, and Eggsy feels a lurch in his stomach. The door hisses open and the other bloke pops up out of his seat like he hadn’t just been dropping bombshells at Eggsy’s feet.

“See you around, Galahad!” the man, who is already walking away, throws over his shoulder, tossing in a cheerful wave. He leaves Eggsy alone because Eggsy is supposed to be Galahad who knows where he is and what he’s doing.

Right.

Eggsy climbs out of the car at a more wary pace, neck craning every which way to examine his industrial-looking surroundings. Most of it is featureless steel and concrete, but then his attention is pulled to the large, panoramic window ahead.

He finds himself overlooking a massive hangar, filled with all sorts of vehicles, from planes to jets to cars to motorcycles. The sight alone is enough to make his mouth water.

“I’ve only ever seen that expression on two others.”

Startled, Eggsy turns sharply to face another stranger, who had been so quiet, he hadn’t even heard his approach.

It’s another man in another perfectly tailored pinstripe suit, but what strikes Eggsy the most are the immediately recognisable accessories he wears: the thick-framed glasses, the watch, the ring on his right hand. “Oh,” he says nonsensically in reply, then hastily tries to cover his panic with a bland smile and equally bland inquiry, “Who was that?”

Instead of receiving an equally inane answer, the man is suddenly _there_ , up in his face, with a hand around his throat, cutting off his air supply.

Eggsy drops Galahad’s coat when his hands automatically fly up to his throat, digging his nails into the man’s hand in a desperate attempt to pry his crushing fingers away from his windpipe, all to no avail. The man, in spite of his seemingly refined appearance, is _strong_.

And bloody frightening. There is a feral glint in his dark eyes as he leans in close and studies Eggsy’s reddening face like one would an insect one is about to squash. “One is regrettably dead and the other is a man I know well enough to know you are not him. So who are you and how did you get in here?”

Oh _shit_.

“Eg—” he tries to say, but the pressure on this throat increases and he frantically tries to draw in a much needed breath. Dark spots start to crowd his vision. “ _Please_ — _!_ ”

Finally, the man deigns to release him and Eggsy stumbles back, slumping to his knees, coughing and trying to inhale as much blessed oxygen as he can. He feels like a rubbish compactor has been clamped around his throat.

“Fucking hell,” he croaks, glaring up at the man through what he is sure are bloodshot and watering eyes.

The man remains unimpressed. “Start talking.”

“Name’s Eggsy Unwin, fuck, _Gary_ Unwin.” It’s painful to push the words out through a rapidly swelling and bruised throat, but fear’s a great motivator. “Ran into your Galahad bloke. I just wanted to...wanted to return some of his things.” Eggsy’s hands scrabble upon the forgotten coat, holding it up to the man like it’s a shield that can protect him from his wrath. “I’m sorry I took them. I wasn’t thinking. I mean, I was thinking. Thinking that he looked exactly like me and that’s fucked up. This whole thing’s fucked up. Where the fuck are we? What the fuck is this place? Who the fuck are you people?”

By the end, his big mouth has gotten the better of him again, and Eggsy finds himself lobbing question after accusatorial question at the man, finding the strength to stand back up and scowl, though the effect is probably ruined by him gingerly rubbing at his throat.

But the man does not appear offended. In fact, he looks like he’s been struck by lightning, staring at Eggsy like he’s just stripped out of all his clothes and declared himself the King of England. “Unwin...” Eggsy hears the man whisper as if to himself, looking dazed for all of a few seconds before his gaze sharpens on Eggsy. “Your father is Lee Unwin?”

Eggsy blinks, because apparently now it’s his turn to be taken aback. “Yeah?” he warily says, then wonders if it had been wise to give up even that much information.

The man stares at him, saying nothing. Eggsy starts to fidget, trying to ignore the way his throat aches. He wishes he had minded his own bloody business after all.

At long last, the man says, “My name is Harry Hart. I knew your father. I believe you have questions.”

This time, it’s Eggsy’s turn to stare. How the hell does his father fit into all this? What the hell even is this? “Too fucking right, mate.”

 

_____

 

Having questions apparently doesn’t mean they’ll get answered any time soon, not when he’s forcefully escorted to a large room that looks like a cross between a medical ward and a science lab. Upon first sight, Eggsy reflexively tries to dig in his heels like a stubborn dog, but Harry just pushes him in with a hand to his shoulder.

Before he can start demanding his aforementioned promised answers, a woman with dark brown hair and a jaw that could probably rival the strength of a pitbull’s appears and jabs a fucking needle into his arm, drawing his blood.

“Ouch, what the bloody hell?” he shouts at them, because he doesn’t know who should be the target of his bewildered ire anymore. They all seem to be in on it.

The woman ignores him, engrossed as she is with the small device she’s reading. A furrowed line appears between her brows and a frown deepens the corners of her mouth. “Merlin, you need to see this,” she says to seemingly no one particular.

Except, she apparently does, because not five seconds later, another bloke, the supposed Merlin, enters the room. He’s bald and tall, taller than Harry, and if Eggsy thought Harry was intimidating, he actively takes a few steps back from this one.

Merlin doesn’t even glance at him though, instead looming over the woman to read what she shows him. “He’s not in the database,” he announces, finally giving Eggsy a sharp look.

“He says he’s Lee Unwin’s son,” Harry tells them, and he might as well have said Eggsy was the son of Jack the Ripper for the way the others stiffen in shock.

“Well,” Merlin says after several moments of stunned silence, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “At least now we know what he stole.”

“My dad ain’t a thief!” Eggsy protests, glaring at all of them now. “If anything, _I’m_ the thief. My dad was a good man, he—”

“Speaking of which,” Harry says, rounding on Eggsy, making him wish he hadn’t spoken to hastily, “you stole Galahad’s things by your own admission. Let me assure you, that would be an incredibly difficult feat to achieve. So where is he and what did you do to him?”

They all look at him now expectant. Harry’s and Merlin’s faces seem to promise pain in his future if he were to give them the wrong answer. “He’s dead,” Eggsy says, realises how that sounds and rushes to add, “He killed himself! Jumped in front of a train at Holborn station. I was right there. Saw it all. I tried to stop him, but I was too far away. He left all his things on the platform. He looked at me, he _saw_ me. He….”

There are varying degrees of it, but Eggsy can see the way his news has come as a great shock to them all. The woman is the most transparent, her hand flying to her mouth, eyes widening. Merlin freezes and then looks away with a slight shake to his head. Harry….

Harry just looks steadily back at him. His face is very still. But it’s like a universe is collapsing in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Eggsy finds himself saying softly to him, wishing he could take it all back.

“Amelia,” Merlin says to the woman next to him, “follow up and verify. If it’s true, we’ll have some cleanup to do. Someone will have to alert Arthur. Damn, we were so certain too.”

The woman, Amelia, nods and promptly leaves to execute her given orders. Merlin looks at Harry, who hasn’t moved at all, with concern.

“Certain of what?” Eggsy dreads to ask.

“That he was version stable,” Merlin says.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_It is astounding to see all the places in the world you once described to me in great detail with my own eyes. It is like a continuous feeling of deja vu. I walk the streets of Milan and I feel like I have been here already. I take in the Angel Falls in Venezuela and I feel like I know this heat and mist kissing my skin. I only wish you could see them with me._

_You never told me how you felt when you experienced these wonders. Were you filled with awe and humbled by the immensity of nature? Did you feel grateful you got to witness something most people in the world never will? Life is short, ours perhaps even more so, but I like to think we make up for it by leading one that is richer and fuller._

_When you told me about the world, you spoke as if your time in it were over, but I should think after seeing all the things I have been able to see, they live in my heart always, and long after I am retired (because I am now determined to make it to the finish line, just like you), I shall relive the memories like rewatching old films._

_Like you, perhaps I will regale my younger self with all the stories of my adventures. Perhaps I will mix in some of yours as well until I confuse yours for mine and mine for yours and no one will ever be able to tell the difference. I like the thought of that, being inextricable from you._

_Yours For Some Time Yet,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

“It appears, Mr Unwin, we have arrived at an interesting impasse,” says the older man who is introduced to Eggsy as Arthur, the man in charge of whatever this whole setup is. He’s beginning to sense a theme. “Where you know more about us than we do about you. That has never happened before.”

“I don’t know shit about you,” Eggsy says just to see the distaste curl at the corner of Arthur’s mouth before the man can smother it. Figures. It’s always good to know what some people are all about and where one actually stood with them.

“Be that as it may, we maintain careful records and constantly monitor all subjects from the moment they are created until the day they die, and until today, we had no idea you existed because you weren’t supposed to,” Arthur tells him.

“What subjects? What are you talking about?” Eggsy feels like he’s been repeating these questions all bloody day.

A flash of condescending amusement sparks in Arthur’s eyes. “You really don’t have any idea at all, do you?” He smirks. “Perhaps there is an even stronger case to be made for nurture affecting one’s IQ more than nature. You, Gary Unwin, are a clone, created by us once upon a time, right here in this facility.”

“You’re fucking with me,” Eggsy says flatly, glancing wildly to Merlin, who is stone faced, and then to Harry, who appears completely checked out of the entire conversation, waiting for one of them to let him in on the joke. “That’s science fiction.”

“And yet you’ve seen the proof with your own eyes, or else how did you end up here?” Arthur says, then almost rolls his eyes in exasperation as he adds, “Speaking of which, someone please speak to James about acting like a proper intelligence operative. We’re supposed to be a secret organisation operating at the highest levels of discretion. We should be acting with just a little more caution instead of admitting any chav we encounter on the street.”

But Eggsy’s still a bit understandably caught up with this clones business. “You mean to tell me there are more people like me?”

“Seven others, to be exact,” Merlin says. “Well, six now that we have confirmation of Galahad’s death.”

“Who are they?”

“That’s classified, I’m afraid.”

“Fuck you, bruv,” Eggsy scowls. “They’re _me_. They’re...I’m….” It hits him then all at once.

He’s not a unique individual.

He’s a clone.

An exact copy of someone else.

He watched one of them kill himself.

He is not original.

“Why?”

“Because we can,” Arthur says calmly. “Because we are furthering science and the welfare of our species.”

“It’s _illegal_.”

“If you knew how many biomedical breakthroughs we’ve contributed to in the last century, you wouldn’t be so quick to judge,” Arthur sneers before standing up and directing his attention to Merlin. “As it is, I remain sceptical, but I haven’t got much choice now, do I? What a waste. Read him in and then relay our offer.”

As soon as Arthur leaves, Eggsy turns back to Merlin and Harry. “Are you...gonna kill me now?”

“That’s dependent on you,” Merlin says, which isn’t comforting.

“I’ll tell him,” Harry suddenly says. It’s the first time he’s spoken since Eggsy told them what happened to Galahad, and it surprises Merlin as much as it does him.

“Harry…” Merlin begins to say, but stops when Harry gives him a little shake of his head.

“He should hear it from me. All of it,” Harry says before giving Eggsy a sad smile. “After all, he is my genetic successor.”


	3. Chapter 3

_The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk... so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being._

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_Whilst we’re on the subject matter of confessions that will never come to light, here is another: I am often tempted to check up on my brothers. I only bring this up because I was in Madrid today, and I knew one was not so far away studying at Zaragoza._

_Alright, I confess again: I took a car out. I glimpsed him with my own eyes (do not worry, I stayed well hidden). How strange it is to see one’s self and yet not. I know it hasn’t been so long since the trials, but already I seem to have forgotten my own face._

_He was very tan, Harry, and his hair was nearly bleached blonde from the sun. He smiled so easily, the cheeky sort that one knows could lead to a great deal of mischief. He was clearly a romantic and a lover, for there was no one who was not trapped within his orbit once he lavished all his many charms and graces upon them._

_My third confession: I was envious._

_I think about how my life could have turned out if I had been him or another just like him. Would I be so carefree? Would I get to love? Would I be happy? Even if my life had not been so blessed or I had not the fortune to grow up in love or relative comfort, would such a life not still be better?_

_So I ask you this, knowing you will never hear it and I will never get an answer: do you ever wonder what it’s like? Do you ever see them? Do you ever wish fate had not chosen you to bear this terrible burden but another just like you to take your place instead?_

_I know such thoughts are not productive. You often tell me that asking myself why is a waste of time and energy better spent. That I will drive myself mad with it if I let it. You have always been eminently more practical than I, but then, you’ve had several decades to live with these things. You had to find a way to survive it somehow, didn’t you?_

_Yours, Always Questioning Maybe,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

After grousing that he had far more valuable things to do with his time than to babysit a bunch of clones—

(“That is practically your entire job description,” Harry smartly tells him.

“Shut it.” Merlin glares at him.)

—Merlin strides away, and it’s just the two of them left in the medical ward or lab or whatever the fuck this place was. Eggsy is filled with so many questions, he doesn’t even know where to begin, but before he can even open his mouth, Harry turns to him and asks, “Would you care for a tour of the grounds?”

It’s a seemingly benign question, but given all that has transpired, not to mention Harry choking the life out of him not more than two hours ago, Eggsy can’t help but clarify, “You’re not gonna take me out into the forest, make me walk like forty paces ahead, and then shoot me, right?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Harry tells him, appearing genuinely offended. “I’d at least have you dig your own grave first.”

Heedless of Eggsy’s open-mouthed alarm, Harry leads them down a maze of corridors that Eggsy can’t keep track of until they finally encounter a lift—an actual proper lift, not a secret dressing room one. The panel of buttons in the lift are divided between various sub-levels and only three floors above the ground.

“Where are we?” Eggsy asks as he watches Harry press the G* button, though he has little hopes of his direct questions ever getting properly answered by this lot. “Sure as fuck not in London.”

It seems as if Harry is always destined to surprise him, though, for he answers promptly with, “Hertfordshire. A rather large, sprawling estate, both above and below ground as you may have noticed. It includes a private air strip, several acres of forest, and two lakes.”

The description, which might as well have been ripped from the pages of a real estate advert, almost sounds quaint when put like that. Like there ought to be a hunting lodge with elk antler decor somewhere on the grounds, and on the weekend all the blue bloods came together for a hunting party, complete with dogs, horses, and those poor fucking foxes. Eggsy’s sure the other suburbanites who dwell here have no idea they are neighbours to a bunch of killer clones. “I’m confused about what you people are. You...clone people and yet that James bloke talked about…” he hesitated, trying to find the most diplomatic way to phrase it, but needs must, “...killing people in Slovenia?”

Maybe he hadn’t heard that one right. He had been under a lot of stress at the time. Still was, in fact.

“We’re a bit of a multi-service shop,” Harry says with a tight smile, not missing a beat, which says something. “After the first World War, the English nobility found themselves with significant fortunes, a dearth of heirs, and the desire to maintain world peace at all cost. They came together to form this agency, which is accountable to no one but itself, but whose mission has always been the betterment of mankind. Of course, the 1940s brought with it the popularity of eugenics, a notion that survived the atrocity of the Nazis and found its way into our labs where it was softened into the notion of not necessarily creating a superior race so much as bettering all of them. Rather than attempt to experiment on actual human beings, however, Kingsman decided it would take the higher road of creating its own human subjects on which to have free reign.”

That all seemed...horrible, actually. For the seemingly hundredth time today, Eggsy finds himself a little speechless as the lift doors slide open and reveal the open parlour of a very handsome, very old, and very wealthy mansion, smelling faintly of dust and wood polish, completely at odds with the spartan, industrial decor of its sublevels.

“What did you mean when you said I was your genetic successor?”

“The young man you encountered in such an upsetting manner had been the second-generation Galahad, named after a knight of the Round Table according Arthurian Mythology. Each Kingsman agent is designated with the codename of a knight. The original Kingsman agents, however, led such highly dangerous lives that were often cut short, it was thought that human clones, in addition to being useful subjects for various experiments, could be created to supplant the more dangerous tasks of Kingsman’s agents as well. But it was only in the 1960s that our cloning experiments started seeing more successes than failures and in 1965 the first salvageable generation of clones was born. I was from that generation and subsequently the first clone to take on the mantle of Galahad. James was originally the first clone to be Lancelot, in fact.”

“You...you were the first Galahad?” Eggsy asked, shocked, nearly tripping over the edge of the area rug they now walked across as they headed for the big French doors on the other side of the vast room. It probably cost more than Eggsy would ever see in his lifetime.

“The first Galahad agent who was a _clone_ , yes. I was taken off primary active duty in 2013 when Galahad 2.0 was selected as the most viable from his cohort and relegated to a mentorship role for my replacement. I would have done so, while still continuing to take on the occasional mission as necessary, until Galahad’s trial period ended in one month’s time and he would have transitioned into a full-time agent.”

Well, that explained Harry’s literally killer moves. But Galahad had offed himself instead. The timing seemed more than a little suspicious. “Maybe he...he didn’t want to be an agent? Did he even have a choice in the matter?”

Or maybe it’s the wrong thing to say, because Harry gives him a withering look that makes Eggsy shrink back. “Choice is irrelevant. We were created for a singular purpose and it is our duty to fulfill that purpose. Galahad beat eleven other candidates in his cohort to prove himself the most genetically superior and stable. It is as Arthur says: to have thrown it all away now is a waste of valuable time, resources, and energy!”

By the end of the entire thing, Harry’s voice had risen so sharply, it echoed off the high ceilings, filling the cavernous space with his heated anger and, underneath it all, Eggsy realises, an extraordinary grief.

It’s still ringing in Eggsy’s ears when he reaches out a hand to touch Harry’s arm, stopping his swift, determine stride.

“You’re sad,” Eggsy says without thinking.

Harry doesn’t look at him as he brushes Eggsy off with, “Don’t be absurd.”

“Why’s that so silly? It’s the truth, innit? He was your...clone or agent protege or whatever. It’s okay to miss your fellow, uh, model. Brother? Son? Wait. Are we...related?” Eggsy asks, trying to keep his face from scrunching up too much because all of this is just so weird.

He tries to sneak covert looks at Harry, straining to see their similarities just in case. Will he look like that when he’s older? Actually, it wouldn’t be so bad, Eggsy reflects, gaze traversing down Harry’s long, lean form.

And that was a really mortifying thought to have if they were related like that.

“We share a common genetic heritage from one of the initial Kingsman founders, the very first man who took on the codename Galahad, in fact.” Harry begins walking again, finding his rhythm in both his long-legged gait and textbook recitation. Far safer ground, that. “All clones of each model stem from their base inheritor, but your DNA has been significantly improved to account for the various discovered defects in my generation. Each new generation is designed to be superior to its predecessor after all.”

Before Eggsy can ask another question, Harry pushes open the doors with a dramatic flourish and the outside grounds of Kingsman’s estate fill his senses.

It’s pretty. And pretty fucking huge, curated green as far as the eye can see, bracketed by dark evergreens, and a cloudless blue sky overhead. Eggsy’s lived in London all his life and has never seen so much vast, open space. He now understands why dogs sometimes feel the urge to run around like mad and roll in the grass and mud with giddy abandon.

He slowly approaches the stone balustrade and peers over. There’s a big white Kingsman logo painted on the lawn in front of them. “You know, for a secret organisation, you lot sure do like to put your name out there.”

Harry joins him. “Sometimes the best way of hiding is in plain sight. You certainly had no idea we existed. To the world, we are just an elite tailor shop for a gentleman’s fashion and apparel.”

“You said there were others like me, in my…generation,” Eggsy hesitantly says, because now that he’s getting to the heart of the matter, he can’t quite think of himself as a fucking clone. He doesn’t mind thinking of himself as having incidental brothers, though. That’s easier to swallow for now. “Where are they? Are they Kingsman agents too?”

“There is only ever one Galahad,” Harry says, and there’s almost a wistful note in his tone, like he’s reliving his own agent days. “Others of your generation are what we consider experimental subjects who are purposely raised out in the ‘wild’, as it were. They are...unaware of their origins, and grow up in various environments, cultures, socioeconomic classes, and countries. We monitor and study the effects these factors have on their physical and mental well-being throughout their entire lives. It helps us with improving the next generation.”

“So, what? I just drew the short end of the straw?” Eggsy can’t help but ask bitterly, wondering if there’s another one of him out there who’s a fancy prince or summat, or who at least has a happy little family in the middle of suburbia somewhere and is studying at uni to be a, fuck if he knew, an accountant or something.

“I’m afraid you weren’t ever supposed to be in play at all,” Harry says, finally turning and regarding him in full. This time, though, instead of looking like he’s contemplating which of Eggsy’s bones to break first, he’s giving Eggsy a more thoughtful if regretful look. “Come on, there’s more yet to see.”

It turns out Kingsman has a large stable and actual horses. Eggsy’s never been so close to one before, and he’s entranced by their long, velvety snouts and big soulful eyes. He’s so fascinated, he forgets the anxiety that has been permanently stewing in his gut and the way Harry just keeps staring at him.

“Lee was very fond of the horses as well. Though he always used to say it was such a great shame how they’ve been bred into such deceptively fragile creatures from their much heartier origins,” Harry remarks, and it’s like someone’s gone and popped Eggsy’s balloon of delight. “He used to work here. Your father was one of our brightest researchers.”

Eggsy shakes his head in denial. “He was in the marines. It’s how he died. That’s what my mum says. Its why he was gone all the time. I mean, I loved my dad, but it weren’t like he had the money to go and study something like that. He wasn’t a….”

“He was an extraordinarily gifted young man who defied the odds of his class to earn a scholarship at Oxford. He was recruited into Kingsman soon after where he advanced the cloning program by decades in a matter of months. His work directly contributed to the person you are today down to a genetic level. Part of his passion stemmed from the fact that he and his equally young wife were having trouble conceiving a child of their own,” Harry says.

Eggsy frowns as the pieces started to take shape. His father, in what few memories he had of him, always seemed to be gone for longer periods of his life than he was ever in it. “So you implanted one of them clones in...in me mum?”

“No. Kingsman employees are banned from taking part in the subject test groups. It’s supposed to be a blind study, you see.”

“I don’t understand. I…”

“Your father was fired from Kingsman in 1997 for theft of property seven years prior. They had evidence that he had accessed a part of the labs for which he did not have proper clearance, but they were never able to discover what it was he had stolen. Not until today.”

“Me,” Eggsy says dully. “He stole me.”

“Yes,” Harry confirms. “He was your creator, but he desired to be your father even more.”

“But my father died that year, how could….” And then, it dawns on him, in all its stunning horror. “You killed him? You _killed_ my father?”

“I only tell you this now, Eggsy,” Harry says. For each step he takes forward, Eggsy takes one back until he finds himself plastered against the side a stall door and one of the fucking horses begins to mouth at his hair. “So that you understand the severity of your situation. Kingsman doesn’t tolerate traitors. It maintains its discretion through absolute means.”

And now Eggsy is only just starting to realise how very alone they are, just them and the horses. Harry had lured him here under false pretenses. He really _was_ going to kill him, fuck. “I’m sorry for sneaking in,” he starts to babble, heart starting its own sprint in his chest, “I won’t say anything! You can ask anyone, I ain’t ever grassed anyone up, swear down!”

“Only one clone from each generation is selected to be an agent. Only one clone in each generation is to be made self-aware of their status,” Harry says, “Galahad is dead, and there is no one to take his place. No one, except for you.”

It takes a few good moments for the meaning of it to set in, and Eggsy releases the breath he’d been holding. “You want...you want me to be Galahad?”

“In time, yes. With training, and a good deal of guidance. It seems my impending retirement will be postponed. That is the offer.”

He wants to ask if Harry’s gone mad, but considering what they are and what’s been going on, Eggsy isn’t sure he wants to know the answer to that. Him, a clone. Him, a secret agent. Him, a secret agent clone for the organisation that killed his father. What the absolute fuck. “And if I said, ‘I’m chuffed, but no thanks, ‘cos you killed my dad and all’?”

“Then I suspect you now have a full understanding of what will happen if you refuse.”

Eggsy swallows, feeling sick. He really wishes he had not decided to be such a good Samaritan. He could have pawned that bloody coat and watch for hundreds of pounds at least. “Then it looks like I haven’t got many options.” At least not right now. He isn’t one to take a bloody raw deal lying down forever.

“Know, Eggsy, this is not what I wanted for you,” Harry suddenly says, reaching out to grip him harshly by the shoulders. The unexpected intensity of it startles him badly enough to start instinctively struggling out of it. “If there were any other way...but Arthur doesn’t enjoy surprises, and you were rather a significant one. Without this proposed compromise, he’d have you join your father’s fate and be done with the whole mess.”

“Why are you saying this? You’re one of _them_! You helped kill my father, you—”

“Because it was me who helped Lee steal you away!” Eggsy stops fighting, going absolutely still. “It had been my idea. Lee had been my friend, and I only wanted to help give him what he couldn’t have for himself. I foolishly thought we could get away with it, and for seven years, we did.” Harry smiles humourlessly. “When Lee was found out, he took all of the blame upon himself and never once implicated me, though I am far more expendable. They executed him, and now I owe your father a debt I cannot ever repay.”

“Then how do you expect me to do this?” Eggsy asks. “Knowing what they did, fuck, what they _do_.”

“Because it’s as you say. You don’t have any other choice. You do what it takes to survive, Eggsy. It’s what those of us who remain here do. It’s all we _can_ do.”

“And if I do this,” Eggsy says, hating the way his voice comes out so thin and scared, like he’s a little boy again, afraid of the dark, “am I just gonna eventually throw myself in front of a train too?”

“No,” Harry says, voice lined with steel, eyes darkened with a fierce determination. “I won’t ever let that happen.”

 _Again_ , he does not say.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_Excuse my tedious sojourn into some numbers, but do humour me a moment._

_Galahad, version 1.0: 25 successful subjects_

_Lancelot, version 1.0: 22 successful subjects_

_Percival, version 1.0: 30 successful subjects_

_Kay, version 1.0: 35 successful subjects_

_And so on, and so forth._

_That may not be news to you, but this is what I find most curious:_

_Galahad, version 2.0: 7 successful subjects_

_Lancelot, version 2.0: 5 successful subjects_

_Kay, version 2.0: 5 successful subjects_

_Percival, version 2.0: 2 successful subjects_

_Bors, version 2.0: 5 successful subjects_

_And that’s it. We don’t have second generations of anyone else, and not a single number in the double digits when our predecessors were in fair abundance. Why the disparity?_

_You tell me it is because there is less of a need for more second generation subjects because of our superior design, but I know you too well, Harry. You get a tightness about your eyes when you are not quite telling me the truth._

_No one, of course, will tell me anything as freely as you do, but it seems even you won’t stand with me on this. Is the programme failing after all? Are we all destined for some inevitable end?_

_And if so, why do I feel nothing other than relief?_

_\- Galahad_

 

_____

 

With the charm of Kingsman’s grounds now fully gone off, Harry takes Eggsy back inside. After all, he’ll have plenty of time to explore the estate more fully later, considering the rest of his foreseeable future will now be spent here.

“My mum’ll be worried,” Eggsy whispers as they re-enter the mansion and head back to the lift. “My mates too. I was only supposed to return a coat.”

“I’ll find a way to tell them you’re safe,” Harry assures.

“And if I’m not?”

Harry stops and turns to him, and Eggsy finds he can’t meet Harry’s gaze. “Eggsy, everything you are about to experience, I have experienced. Everything you will do, I have done. You are already superior to me by design. And you have another thing that I did not,” he says, finally drawing out Eggsy’s curiosity, enough to get him to look up, “You are not alone.”

Looking at Harry in all his well put together elegance and graceful movements, it’s difficult for Eggsy to believe he’s somehow supposed to be better than the man standing before him. For one, Harry’s not about to have a fucking panic attack.

“Hello Harry, Hello Eggsy.”

The new voice, young, female, suitably distracts Eggsy from his spiralling thoughts, and when he turns to look at her, he is met with a woman about his own age with light brown hair and a kind, pretty face. Her smile dims when she focuses on Harry again. “I’m sorry to hear about Galahad.”

“Eggsy, this is our recently made Lancelot. She is James’s successor,” Harry introduces, and as if on cue, she promptly holds out her hand.

“ _This_ is Lancelot?” Eggsy asks incredulously instead of doing the polite thing such as shaking it. “Uh, no offence, I mean. I thought...I thought we was all supposed clones…?”

“This is what I mean when I say that DNA can be significantly modified and improved with each generation.” Harry smirks.

“Sorry,” Eggsy says sheepishly, belatedly taking her hand.

“It’s alright, you wouldn’t be the first to assume as much,” Lancelot replies. “Kingsman ultimately found it useful to have a female agent among its ranks. It opens a lot more doors for us in terms of the types of missions we can pursue.”

“Like what?” Eggsy asks. “‘Cos the only things I can think of off the top of my head are all about...oh.”

“We live to serve,” Lancelot says before nodding to them in goodbye.

As she walks away, hips swinging from side to side, neat pony tail swinging in counterpoint behind her, Eggsy says, “So you can add high-class escort agency among all your top-tier services, is it?”

“Who said that’s solely within the domain of the females?” Harry’s already walking away when Eggsy looks back at him and stops sputtering, leaving him to hastily catch up, jumping into the lift with him just as the doors slide shut.

“So...what now then, since, you know, I indicated my preference for not dying?”

“Your timing is rather auspicious, all things considered.” Eggsy nearly snorts, which Harry ignores in favour of going on to say, “As it happens, tonight, we are starting the Kay trials. For the time being, you will join them in their assessments.”

“Kay?”

“Another future agent in the making.”

The lift doors open back onto one of the sublevels, the same one Eggsy was on before for all he knew. He’s got to follow Harry anyhow through another disorienting twist of hallways until they arrive at a door that is equally as indistinguishable as the others save for Merlin standing before it with a clipboard.

As soon as he sees them, Merlin eyes Eggsy, then has some sort of silent conversation with Harry before glancing at Eggsy again. “It’s good to have you on board, Eggsy,” Merlin says sincerely before waving a hand at the door. “In you go.”

Eggsy glances at Harry for confirmation, and at Harry’s nod, he moves to the door, opens it, and steps through.

Twelve identical faces turn their heads at the same time to look at him, and the eerie effect of seeing so many of the exact same faces with the exact same expressions, standing next to each other in the exact same drab grey boiler suits, causes Eggsy to reel back.

Clones. They’re all clones.


	4. Chapter 4

_You could not give up a human heart as you could give up drinking. The drink was yours, and you could give it up: but your lover’s soul was not your own: it was not at your disposal; you had a duty towards it._

 

_____

 

They are all tall, saved from a gangly physique by what appears to be a strict exercise and diet regimen, with thick dark hair to be envious of and equally dark eyes. Strong jaws, full lips. Handsome, but the intensity of their gaze, and being the focus of so many of them, is unsettling.

Eggsy blurts out the first thing that comes to his mind. “Hiya, fellas.”

They continue to stare at him, nonplussed, and Eggsy forces himself to shrug indifferently and focus on the room instead. Plain grey panel walls, cement floors, utilitarian beds with military corners. Barracks-style, which is not so different from his brief stint in Marines training. There are completely open toilet and shower facilities at the other end of the dormitory, like Kingsman had taken the whole open layout concept just a bit too far.

He turns back to the door and tugs on the handle, just enough to see if it’s locked, and stumbles back when it flies open and Merlin nearly runs over him.

“Fall in,” Merlin says like it’s a pleasant suggestion, but it’s a familiar enough command that Eggsy’s body has already started moving before the last syllable fades from Merlin’s lips.

At least they all share that in common, Eggsy thinks, as he finds himself clumped together with the other clones standing at attention in the centre of the room, feeling a bit like the runt of the litter.

“You are about to embark on your ATAs—that is, your Agent Training Assessments—for the Kay designation,” Merlin begins, before looking at Eggsy. “You will note the discrepancy among your ranks today.” Eggsy can feel the other clones’ sidelong stares. “You will refer to him from now on as ‘Galahad’. He will be completing the assessments alongside you, but he is not a Kay model. Understood?”

A unified chorus of ‘ _Yes, sir_ ’ fills the room. Eggsy isn’t sure he’ll ever get used to the perfect synchronicity of their actions.

“Good,” Merlin replies and with a small wave of his hand and nod of his head, finishes with an equally congenial, “Fall out.”

They don’t, not until the last of Merlin’s jumper disappears behind the closing door and Eggsy feels like he can breathe just slightly easier again, though not really by all that much. When he turns, he sees most of the clones scattering to a bed each in order to examine the contents of their slim uniform lockers.

All but three, who stand around him not unlike hungry trolls.

“Right...” Eggsy says slowly as he scans the identical faces, “I’m not exactly sure what I should call you.”

“We are given designations from the phonetic alphabet until such a time we earn an agent designation. I am Alpha,” says the first.

“Bravo,” introduces the second.

“Charlie,” finishes the third, who, despite having the same manner and tone as the previous two, somehow seems so much more _smug_ about it. “We heard the rumours of what happened to the previous Galahad, but it’s hardly surprising. Mental instability is a common defect in your model. You must be one of the of experimentals. Where did they dig you up?”

“Experimentals?”

“The ones who aren’t aware of what they are,” Bravo explains, nearly rolling his eyes at Eggsy’s ignorance. “Kingsman must have been desperate if this is what they’ve had to resort to.”

Great, not only does he get looked down upon by posh pricks in real life but cloned posh pricks as well. And he can’t even deliver a good mum joke because they haven’t got any.

“How does it feel being the ugly one?” he settles on instead, which is, alright, still pretty good, if the sneer and eventual backing away he gets in return is anything to go by.

“Don’t mind them,” a voice says, pulling Eggsy’s attention to...yet another Kay clone. It never fails to surprise him each time. This one, at least, actually comes across as friendly, holding out his hand as politely as Lancelot had. “They think they’re superior to the rest of us because they were the first three to be created. I’m Echo, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you,” he says, reaching out to shake Echo’s hand. “I know I’m supposed to be Galahad now, but my name’s actually Eggsy.”

“Echo and Eggsy,” Echo says, his lips quirking into an amused smile. “They say retired agents get to select their own names. I look forward to the day. I think I would like the name ‘Alex’. Are you from London?”

“Born and raised,” Eggsy confirms. “Never really been anywhere else before now. Well, once. Dartmoor. Basic training. Not exactly a holiday, that.”

“I was born in this facility and have spent my entire life on these grounds. We aren’t allowed to leave unless we achieve agent status.”

“Sounds like it’d feel small after awhile. Even London got to be that way,” Eggsy replies, thinking about the many long, listless days of wandering the streets, jobless and broke. They often led to nights filled with a bit too much trouble.

“It’s not so bad. We are kept to very structured timetables. It keeps us busy. We’ve been training our whole lives for this moment, the chance to become an agent.”

Eggsy is so tempted to ask him _why_. What was so great about being stuck on the same patch of earth all one’s life, being told what to do, what to eat, what to wear, not even having a name for yourself until you’ve got no more use.

But then he looks at Echo’s face and sees the tentative hope in it. Because maybe there’s not much freedom in being an agent, but it’s a hell of a lot more freedom than his current lot in life. It’s a chance to have some sort of identity of one’s own. It’s a chance to travel and, if that James bloke’s ramblings were anything to go by, do some pretty cool things.

And Eggsy got all that simply by showing up at the front door. He’s surprised Echo isn’t seething in resentment at him for it. He didn’t choose this, but then, neither did anyone else.

“Then may the odds be ever in your favour,” he jokes, but Echo only gives him a bemused look.

 

_____

 

He doesn’t think he’ll get much sleep in this unknown place, not in a room with so many strangers, but after all the stressful spikes of worrying about his imminent death in the last twelve hours, Eggsy no sooner closes his eyes when he all but becomes dead to the world.

Of course, he has to dream about Galahad. Except this time, it’s Galahad who is him in his usual clothes, and he’s Galahad, wearing his nice suit, vision blurry with tears. He takes off all the trappings of his life, one by one, and puts them in his pocket for himself (the real Galahad) to find.

He feels the slight vibrations of the platform beneath his feet and the growing rumble of the oncoming train. He turns to look back at himself, only to find Galahad nodding at him like he’s doing the right thing.

Then Galahad is opening his mouth, trying to say something that Eggsy can’t make out, the roar of the train is too loud. He supposes it hardly matters anyway as he leans back and waits for the air to catch him, submerging himself in the bright lights and then the sharp, brutal and complete darkness—

He awakes to coldness lapping at his chest.

No, but that isn’t quite right. 

When Eggsy looks down, he finds himself chest deep in water. “What’s going on?”

He sits up and sees the entire room is nearly half submerged already. The other clones have woken too, eyes wide with panic. In the time it took to do even that, the water’s already risen up to his chin, so Eggsy struggles to stand up on his bed, trying to keep his balance by holding onto a ridge in the light panels of the ceiling.

“Loo snorkels!” one of them shouts, which seems to send a consensus of agreement rippling through the others. As if connected by a single mind, they start moving to the showers as one mass.

“Loo snorkels?” he’s left to wonder bewilderingly. “Why doesn’t someone just open the fucking door?”

But he’s wasted too much time arguing already because the water level swiftly rises over his lips, he turns his face to the ceiling, manages to drink in one last breath of air, before the room is entirely filled.

It’s stunningly quiet underwater with only the occasional gurgle in his ear, everything bathed in a serene blue glow. The others are fiddling about in the showers, but Eggsy has no bloody idea what they’re doing, so he might as well try to escape. He swims towards the door and yanks at the handle, and it’s only then that he realises his critical error: it doesn’t matter if the door’s locked or not, the water pressure is going to keep it firmly shut.

He glances back at the others again and sees them all...sucking on metal tubes? The showerhead nozzles, but how the fuck are they even getting air?

It’s not something he can think about for too long as he swims towards them. His lungs are starting to burn. As he nears the clones, he sees that they’ve got the tubes pushed down into the toilets, and while he still doesn’t understand, he has the distinct feeling that no one’s going to offer one up to him.

Eggsy looks past them because there’s got to be another way. Kingsman isn’t just going to drown them all on the first night, right? That, and he doesn’t want to admit that maybe he should have thought of one of them loo snorkels first, uneducated and unprepared little experimental chav that he’s turning out to be.

But there’s nothing that immediately comes to mind. Just the sinks and tile and mirror.

Wait.

He swims closer to the mirror, only to realise it’s not set against the wall so much as a part of it.

Well, alright then.

Bracing himself against the taps of the sink, Eggsy rears back his fist and throws it forward against the glass with all of his strength, which is significantly restrained by the water. The initial impact hurts like hell, the pain shooting up his arm, and the entire punch doesn’t make so much as a dent, but black dots are appearing in his vision and his body is starting to feel like it is slowing burning up from within. He has no other options.

So he accepts and then ignores the pain as he renews his efforts, bringing his fist down to bear again and again and again, smashing into the reflection of his own increasingly desperate face.

He’s rewarded when the first spidery thin cracks appear across the glass, spreading out in a widening web beneath his knuckles until the mirror seems to warp, bend in, and then suddenly the whole thing blows wide open.

Eggsy gets dragged through the new opening in the wall by a torrent of rushing water until he finds himself coughing on the floor of the adjacent room, soaked and shivering and utterly wrung out, surrounded by the equally miserable, sopping wet bodies of his companions.

“A new record for escape, well done.”

Eggsy wipes the water from his eyes and nose to look up. Merlin stands there off to the side of the room, a waterproof lab coat buttoned over his jumper, tapping at something on his clipboard, with Amelia waiting patiently at his side, engrossed in her own tablet. “Oxygen levels are at acceptable levels. Yours especially, Galahad,” which causes Eggsy to blink, “Amelia, alert cleanup. We have one failure. Collapsed left lung, a noted weakness in samples X-21 and X-23.”

“Cleanup en route,” Amelia confirms.

“Wait, what?” Eggsy asks, moving to stand. “What failure?”

In answer, Merlin nods back to the other room, redirecting Eggsy’s gaze to the lone pale body sprawled across the wet ground. “Our first failure, this one due to physical defect,” Merlin explains, looking not at all surprised or affected by what he was even saying. “I believe he was...ah yes, I believe his designation was Echo. Amelia, make note.” 

“He’s dead?” This time, the coldness that sinks into his body isn’t from the water. He can’t take his eyes off the still body, willing it to get up, move, come alive again.

And then he remembers what Harry had said.

_Galahad beat eleven other candidates in his cohort to prove himself the most genetically superior and stable._

_There is only ever one Galahad_.

So it must hold true as well: there is only ever one Kay.

Eggsy knows he’s in shock, his mouth opens and closes like a fish, wanting to say too many things at once, thinking too many things at once, and yet no sooner does a thought go through his head that it scatters away again.

Echo was the only clone who had been nice to him. No, not a clone. A human. A boy. A boy who had been born here, grew up here, and now died here.

A boy who simply dreamed of one day being called _Alex_.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_Today, I killed my first man._

_And now, I can’t stop seeing his face. He wasn’t a good man. In fact, quite the opposite. The world is better off for his absence. But I did it. I ended his life with my two hands._

_Do you remember your first one? I’m certain you do. How could you not? It imprints itself on your brain until you can close your eyes and still see it, crystal clear: death, that final stage of life._

_Now that I’ve had a few glasses to settle down, I can’t stop thinking of that first night of ATAs. That moment when you stop looking at your cohort as your fellow selves and start looking at them as rivals competing for dwindling resources. On that first night, it had been precious oxygen. I watched one, I can’t even remember who it was anymore, drown to death before my very eyes. I did nothing to help him. It was either him or me._

_I haven’t thought about him in a long while. Any of them, for that matter. Now I feel ashamed that I could so easily forget. I know what you will tell me: we aren’t supposed to think of them as ever having lived. They weren’t ever fully realised to begin with. They didn’t even have names. But they existed, Harry. They were people._

_I know they do this to signal all that will follow, to prepare you for the life you are about to lead should you be the one to ultimately succeed, but that doesn’t mean any of it is easy. Until that point of no return, you were in a cocoon of security. It may not have been a large existence or even a particularly enviable one, but every day, you woke up and took for granted that you would breathe and eat and live and dream and go to bed to wake up the next day, alive, pain-free, and, if not happy, then at the very least content._

_Death changes that. You suddenly realise how fragile all of life is, how fragile_ you _are. Everything becomes precious, because none of it will last._

_\- G_

 

_____

 

“They fucking _killed_ him, Harry!”

Eggsy knows he should probably be asleep with the other clones in their much drier but completely identical-looking dormitory, but every time he closed his eyes, he saw Echo’s body spread out on the ground until he was all but convinced it was actually still there. He had to go and confirm it for himself, crawling out of bed and making the short walk back to the other dormitory. It was still wet, with puddles of water everywhere. The body had, of course, been removed.

The sight, or lack thereof, had been so anticlimactic, and he’d been so restless, that he sought out his supposed new mentor’s company instead.

He’d been found wandering the corridors, lost, by a somewhat vexed Amelia, but after stuttering out an explanation, she only knotted her brow for a hot minute before coming to a decision and personally escorting him to the location he desired to go.

Turns out, there are perks to making agent status, and one of them is quarters with actual windows topside. Not that there’s much to see at this time of night, but Eggsy realises he’s going to have to start taking to heart the saying, _any day above ground is a good one_.

Harry had opened the door to his tentative knock, and Eggsy had blinked at his lack of glasses and almost intimate appearance of a red dressing gown tied over what looked like cream coloured pyjamas. He took one look at Eggsy’s haunted expression and Amelia’s apologetic one, and quietly accepted Eggsy from Amelia’s dutiful but otherwise very busy hands.

Now they sat in what looked like a private sitting room, and Eggsy could observe by the dimmed lights that it was filled with all manner of curiosities: carved items and trinkets and framed paintings and photos, things that Harry must have picked up in all his travels, things that made the room smell like one big nexus of time and places and memories. And books. So many books that they far surpassed the space Harry had on his bookshelves and had long since migrated to other surfaces. Harry now sat among them, elegantly positioned in graceful repose on one end of the sofa with a full glass of scotch cradled in his hand that he previously had fixed for himself (none for Eggsy, though, not during assessments, he chided when Eggsy had asked), patiently listening to Eggsy’s woes.

“They purposely pumped the room full of water just to see which one of us could hold our breath the longest and which ones couldn’t? What kind of fucking assessment is that?” he continues to rant, pacing up and down the length of the room.

“The kind where every physical and psychological limit must be tested,” Harry finally says in the brief interim of quiet not filled with Eggsy’s outrage. “The life of an agent is not an easy one. Kingsman has to know one will be able to handle the job.”

“He was a person, Harry! They treat them like they’re some sort of expendable, endless resource!”

“Have you ever heard of the term _simulacrum_ , Eggsy?” Harry ask, and the seeming randomness of the question stops Eggsy in both his pacing and thoughts.

“What?”

“It’s Latin in origin, meaning, ‘likeness’. It is a term used to describe an imitation,” Harry patiently explains in his casually offhand manner that never felt pedantic. “But it also carries with it associations of being inferior, because a copy is assumed to not have the same intrinsic value or qualities of the original. It’s why an original painting or first edition book is nearly priceless and why,” he flaps a hand to encompass the art on his walls and the books sitting haphazardly on his tables, “you can buy any art print or paperback copy for a mere sliver of the cost.”

“You’re saying that because we’re just a bunch of fucking copies of some other human beings, we’re inferior? We’re not worth as much?” Eggsy asks incredulously. “That’s bullshit!”

“I’m saying that is how Kingsman views us, how we are taught to view ourselves, and, I imagine, how the rest of society would view us if they ever knew the truth. Furthermore, Kingsman can detect the faults within each copy. I’m afraid the cloning process has not been so advanced as to be entirely smooth and flawless. The human genome is infinitely complex and has a way of misbehaving during development. Several clones have experienced various physical and mental illnesses or weaknesses, from minor to fatal. Sometimes such things don’t come to light until placed under extreme stress. That is what the assessments are for: to find the strongest and cull the weak. You should have seen my generation. We had also utilised the showerheads as breathing apparatuses. Most do because we are taught survival techniques from a very young age. But there were still only six showers at the time and many more of us. You can imagine what happened. We had twelve die in the water test alone.”

“Twelve? _Twelve?_ ” Eggsy practically screeches. “How many did you start off with?”

“ _Many_ ,” is all Harry says, giving Eggsy a wisened look that could roughly if accurately translate to, _I’ve seen some shit_ , or, to be more polite and old-fashioned about it, _Back in my day_.

It’s also a look that makes Eggsy realise Harry’s eyes are more than a bit red and glassy, which had been hard to pick up on at first in the poor lighting. Once he notices that, other little stray details rise to the surface of his attention: the lack of tension with which Harry always seemed to hold himself, every line in his body, once held so proper and upright, now gently sloped in exhaustion. The way he just a little too eagerly takes less than proper _gulps_ of his scotch, enough to make Eggsy wonder how many Harry’s had before he even showed up.

It belatedly occurs to Eggsy that he’s known Harry for less than a day, even though it already feels like he’s known Harry forever, that he’s been _here_ forever, and that they started off their association by Eggsy telling him his previous protege was dead.

“Harry,” he tentatively says, “are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Harry says automatically. 

“‘Cos I don’t think you’re actually sober right now.”

“Perfectly so,” Harry says, which Eggsy is now certain Harry doesn’t realise isn’t quite the right answer. “As agents, we are encouraged to imbibe often in order to maintain a high tolerance. It helps to blend in with several social situations while still maintaining a relatively level head.”

“You’re actually full of shit right now,” Eggsy notes in wonder. “It’s okay, you know. I can’t imagine any of this has been easy for you either. You knew him for at least a few years, right?”

Harry rubs a hand down his face. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“Like I said before, it’s okay to be sad. You two was close, wasn’t you?”

“We were…” Harry begins before pausing and glaring at Eggsy, realising what he had begun to do and subsequently blaming Eggsy for taking advantage of his less than alert state. “We were just mentor and protege. It was just our roles.”

“What was he like?” Eggsy insisted.

“He was highly competent.” Eggsy nearly rolls his eyes at the generic description, but Harry isn’t finished. “He had immense physical talent. He loathed inaction. Excellent marksman, extremely lethal in hand-to-hand and weapons combat. He was a joy to teach.”

The thousand yard stare crawls back into Harry’s expression. He’s not really here anymore, but he continues to speak, now that he’s on a roll. “He was also surprisingly kind. He had a soft heart. Perhaps too soft, in retrospect. He was very spirited. Very stubborn and wilfull. I tried to maintain strict professional boundaries at first, but, like you, such things like propriety did not concern him. Eventually, in spite of myself, we became friends.” But Eggsy’s suspects there was even more to it than that, judging by the haunted expression on Harry’s face and the immense sadness in his eyes that now turn and focus on him with the same unsettling intensity as the Kay clones. “You remind me of him. It is...not easy to look at you and not see him.”

“I’m sorry,” Eggsy says, and to his horror, he sees Harry’s eyes fill with moisture until a tear manages to brim over the edge and slip down his cheek.

Harry seems equally horrified, roughly swiping at the tears with the back of his shaky hand. “I think it’s time you return to your bed, Eggsy. You really shouldn’t have left the others.”

“Why not? I’m apparently already an agent. Don’t I get to come and go as I please?”

“That isn’t the point.” Harry moves to stand and unexpectedly stumbles forward.

Eggsy moves swiftly to steady him, the first time he’s ever reached out and touched Harry, who feels worn thin in his hands. This close, he can smell the liquor on him, and underneath that, the softer notes of cologne, something earthy and resinous. “Maybe I’m not the one that needs to be in bed, bruv.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Harry concedes, at last realising his own precarious state.

He leans heavily on Eggsy as Eggsy helps him into the bedroom and then into his bed (a big four-poster thing, probably includes sheets with a billion thread count), tucking him in under the duvet like an ill child. Harry is as complacent as one, sighing beneath the warmth and softness as he presses a cheek into his pillow, eyes fluttering closed.

Eggsy moves to the en suite and fills the glass he finds there with water, locates a bottle of aspirin in one of the drawers and shakes out two tablets, setting everything down on the nightstand next to Harry for the inevitable hangover and regret that is sure to arrive first thing in the morning.

He’s nearly certain Harry’s asleep by the time he starts for the door, but a thick, slurred voice stops him in his tracks.

“It was my fault.”

Eggsy holds his breath, and when more isn’t forthcoming, tentatively asks, “What was?”

“His death.”

“He killed himself. That wasn’t on you, Harry.”

“I drove him to it.”

Eggsy frowns. “What do you mean?”

“It was my fault,” Harry repeats before turning onto his side away from Eggsy, his breath deepening into slumber.

 

_____

 

_My Dear Harry,_

_Though the memory of your rejection still makes me feel like my skin is on fire and my heart is shrivelling in on itself in my chest, I want you to know I still love you._

_See, I don’t think you mean it, Harry. I know you. I know when you think you are doing something good for me at great cost to yourself. To us._

_I want you to know it’s alright._

_Because despite your exasperated remarks to the contrary, I can be patient. I will wait for you to realise the truth: we are allowed to love. It may be the only thing they cannot forbid us to do._

_I love you._

_And until you can look me in the eye and tell me you don’t, I will continue to believe you love me too._

_Love,_

 _Galahad_


	5. Chapter 5

_Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting._

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_You never met Audrey, but she was lovely. She was whippet thin, and very fast. She wasn’t overtly dominant, but she loathed any other creature who sought to assert their authority over her. Even me._

_We eventually compromised on a mutually beneficial partnership. She would follow all my silly commands and I would allow her to sleep where and when she wanted and give her an endless supply of toys and treats. If I somehow failed in my duty or was found wanting in any way, she would urinate on my bed._

_She was very aloof, except for the times I needed her most, Harry. Then she would allow me to hold her and lean into her as much as I wanted. She didn’t even resent these moments, just quietly accepted them, like she knew it was as much a part of her life as the early morning runs and the pointless commands to do absurd things at random._

_Unlike you, I am not completely turned off from having a pet. You can trust an animal. Their needs are simple, and so long as you fulfill them, they will love you unconditionally. I enjoy how easy such a connection is. Love given and love returned. Shouldn’t love always be that way?_

_Yours,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

It is at an hour far too early in the morning when they are woken up and directed to line up outside on the perfect, manicured lawn. Before them is a pyramid of cages containing...puppies. Eggsy isn’t sure what the strangest moment of this whole experience has been, but this one ought to rank pretty high.

“As some of you will have learned from last night, we're here to enhance your skills and test you to the limit,” Merlin says from his place on the patio loftily situated above them. The reminder gives Eggsy a bitter taste in the back of his throat. “Which is why you're gonna pick a puppy. This may be the first time you’ve seen this animal in real life, but you’ve read about various breeds before and know they often make loyal companions to humans and are even bred for certain qualities.”

Eggsy glances at the puppies again. He can recognise a poodle, a German shepherd, a few bulldogs, but it wasn’t like he was a dog breeder. He looks at the others to see their reactions.

“Wherever you go, your dog goes,” Merlin drones on, but most of them are now focused on the dogs instead with a mixture of curiosity and scepticism. “You will care for it. You will teach it. And by the time it's fully trained, so will you be. Those of you who are still here, that is. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” says the unified chorus.

“Then choose your puppy wisely.”

The clones take their time like they’re trying to pick out the ripest fruit in the stand, but Eggsy simply walks over to one of the cages and opens it, scooping out the small, shivering creature within. The puppy is unexpectedly lightweight, no bigger than his two hands. It looks up at Eggsy with wide brown eyes and a squashed, ugly face before licking his hand in earnest. “You’re gonna be a proper guard dog, ain’tcha?” he says to it, unable to keep the smile off his face.

And that’s it for the morning. They are given the time to acquaint themselves with their new furry charges. Most of the clones immediately launch into obedience training, hooking leads onto their collars and dragging them out onto the grounds. Eggsy just curls his puppy against his chest where it is content to snuggle into the warmth of his boiler suit and walks back inside.

“Harry, they gave us dogs!” is the first thing Eggsy says when Harry opens his door.

Despite having returned to his proper suit and perfectly styled hair, he can see that Harry is predictably a bit worse for wear today. He blinks at Eggsy slowly, then sluggishly studies the little brown furry snout that is the only thing visible from the cradle Eggsy’s arms.

“Ah, yes,” Harry says underwhelmingly before backing up to let Eggsy in. “Studies have shown one of the best ways of learning a subject is to teach it. You teach your dog obedience, and so shall you learn.”

“What? Even this is supposed to be some sort of lesson?” Eggsy asks as he steps into Harry’s quarters, hugging his puppy closer to his chest reflexively. “Not one of them has even seen a dog before. Isn’t that mad? They looked at them like they were picking out...I dunno...new wellies. But that’s not what you are, are you, JB?”

“JB?”

Eggsy looks away in embarrassment. “Uh, Jack Bauer.”

But Harry still looks at him blankly.

“ _Really?_ ”

“Like your cohort, Eggsy, I too, had never seen a dog before the day they gave us one of our own,” Harry says, rubbing at the bridge of his nose like he’s trying to massage away a headache. “I knew what they were in theory, but to have a real life example of one in one’s care was an altogether different experience.”

“You had a dog?” Eggsy asks as he unwraps the very reluctant puppy from its warm nest and gently places him on Harry’s floor. JB wobbles on short, unsteady legs for a moment before tentatively sniffing around.

“Many years ago.” Harry clinically watches JB approach his oxford shoe and sniff at it suspiciously before giving it a few washes with his pink tongue. The size difference between them is almost comical, and Eggsy feels like he could just sit and watch JB with heart eyes and a big dosy smile all day, but Harry seems largely unmoved by the tiny creature. “You must enjoy a challenge. Pugs aren’t the easiest breeds to train.”

Eggsy frowns. “Pug? It’s a bulldog, innit?”

“No, Eggsy.”

He stares at JB like JB’s gone and betrayed him. “It’ll get bigger, won’t it?”

“Not by very much, I’m afraid.”

“Oh…. Shit.”

Harry arches a brow at him. “What was it you were saying about those poor, sheltered clones never having seen a dog before?”

“Oh, shut up. Yeah, alright, I get it.” Eggsy scowls, feeling the heat suffuse his cheeks.

 

_____

 

As the weeks go by, Eggsy discovers how Harry is infuriatingly correct. As cute as he is, JB’s a nightmare to train.

All the other puppies have grown large enough and are eager enough to run with their owners on the outdoor course, even if their paws are still too large for their bodies and they end up happily tripping over their own legs more often than not.

But JB? Nope. Five minutes in, JB resists all of Eggsy’s tugs on his lead, firmly planting his rump in the grass and growling at Eggsy every time he tries to get the pup to start running.

“JB, come on!” he shouts at the creature, then realises he’s shouting a dog who doesn’t even understand him, but he’s too frustrated to care as the rest of the clones grow smaller and smaller in the distance. In a pique of irritation, he aims the rifle he has to carry at the puppy. “I swear I’ll shoot you if you don’t get up!”

Which is even more ridiculous, because now he’s threatening a puppy with an automatic rifle of all bloody things, as if that would make him understand any better.

“Merlin says we can’t hold you,” Eggsy sighs, and lowers his gun, grinding his teeth at the whole stupid situation.

Also as Harry predicted, JB hasn’t really grown much, unlike the other puppies who seemed to double their weight and size by the day. Eggsy can still cradle the tiny thing in his arms with not much trouble.

Which finally gives him an idea.

Unzipping his flak jacket and boiler suit, he scoops up JB by his middle and nestles him against his chest, carefully zipping up his clothes around the creature. Now out of the gruelling cold and difficult exertions enforced upon him by his owner, JB happily settles into the warmth and comfort against Eggsy’s body.

“Don’t ever say I didn’t do nothing for you,” Eggsy grumbles, adjusting the pack on his back and picking up his rifle, doubling his efforts to catch up with the rest of the clones.

When he rounds the bend of a particularly steep path, he almost runs into the crowd of them, managing to stop himself just in time by reflexes alone.

He’s about to grin and make a smug remark about everyone else already getting tired, but then he realises that isn’t the cause for them stopping. Eggsy’s gaze is pulled down to what they all are focused upon: one of the clones, spasming on the ground bad enough that vomit dribbles from the corner of his mouth while his puppy whimpers and noses at him.

“Holy fuck!” Eggsy gasps, pushing his way through the stagnant crowd to kneel by the clone and turn him onto his side so at least he won’t choke on his sick. He has some first aid training, but not much, and it’s been a long time since at that. He looks up at the other clones frantically. “Well don’t just stand there, you fucking knobs! Someone go get help!”

“There’s no point,” says one of them dispassionately. “Kilo was demonstrating neurological symptoms for the last five days. He was already on his way out.”

Eggsy just stares at him incredulously, but the increasing choking noises emerging from the body below him pull his attention away. “Hey, hey, hey,” he tells Kilo, trying to soothe him while gently holding his limbs close to his body. “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay. You ain’t alone, you hear me?”

Eggsy holds Kilo until the shudders weaken and then stop all together and the body beneath him grows too still. Kilo’s puppy, some sort of labrador, begins to pace in front of him in clear distress, high-pitched whimpers almost unable to be heard.

It’s awful. Eggsy wants to shove the body away and run, just keep running, but he doesn’t. He forces himself to stay, holding JB close, even as the clones filter away and the cleanup crew arrives to load the body into a black body bag.

Merlin comes to stand beside him, having overseen the entire operation. “Time to go back now, Galahad.”

“He should’ve got medical attention earlier. Could’ve prevented this,” Eggsy says. “I should’ve noticed. The others did. I didn’t. I just...didn’t see them individually. They’ve always just been ‘the others’.”

“We could have made him more comfortable if we had known earlier. He would have been removed from the assessments, certainly,” Merlin says. “But no, Eggsy, this was going to happen at some point or another. His genetic defects were fatal.”

If that was supposed to be comforting, then Merlin did a piss poor job. Eggsy glares at him. “How do you live with yourself? Knowing you create these humans who are gonna just suffer like this?”

Merlin focuses on him, and it’s not half intimidating as fuck. “Much like everyone else who is here. You feel bad about it for a day or two. Perhaps a little longer, given different sensitivities. Then time lessens the sting. You forget what little details you picked up. After all, you didn’t bother to learn enough about this one before, so no lasting impression will have been made. And there are still so many others. Soon, you won’t even remember who was who. After so many failures, you learn to distance yourself or you don’t survive it.”

“Why do you do this then?” Eggsy asks, not even with anger, just a plaintive desperation to know.

“Like everyone else, I thought I was changing world, and I am. It’s only on some days that I question whether it’s for the better,” Merlin says before leaving him to join the rest of the cleanup crew on the ride back to the estate.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_I had a nosebleed today, and it sent me into an episode that lasted a full afternoon. I went through all the psychological assessments I could recall. I researched on the internet possible causes of such a symptom. I looked back through our medical records to see what were our known weaknesses._

_Turns out, it was only because the air up here is so dry. I am told nosebleeds are a common occurrence among people who are not acclimated to this environment. Now I feel relieved, if a bit silly._

_There is a term for people like us. But is one really a hypochondriac when the threat is very real? We are more fortunate than most, I suppose. No real respiratory or neurological issues. Good bone density and musculature. Sometimes I think you are a particular admirer of that last, the way you look at me when you think I do not see. It feels like fire raking down my skin._

_I try to return it, to let you know that such thoughts aren’t unwelcome, but I am either doing something wrong or you are being purposely obtuse. I admit either option is a distinct possibility, but given that I have all but flung myself naked into your arms (the old slip in the showers trick resulted in nothing), I am strongly beginning to suspect the latter._

_Yours, The Ever Frustratingly Pure,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

By the time Eggsy makes it back on to Kingsman’s groomed grounds, the sun is sinking into the horizon. All the warm lights shining from the mansion's many windows onto the lawn almost make it seem homey and comforting, but Eggsy just grimaces.

To his surprise, though, it’s Harry who is waiting for him on the outdoor steps, Amelia by his side.

“Something wrong?” he asks, slowing down his approach. “Well, _more_ wrong, I guess?”

“Amelia will take JB to the kennels while you wash up,” Harry says, not rising to the bait. “Arthur has assembled the table.”

“What’s that mean?”

“A Kingsman has fallen.”

Immediately, Eggsy’s thoughts go to Galahad as his stomach feels like it has turned to lead. Did another one jump in front of a train too? Maybe some other way? The various ways in which one can end one’s life play out in Eggsy’s imagination as he quickly showers and then goes to change, but when he goes to put on a clean boiler suit, there’s a dress bag hanging in his locker instead. Pinned to the front of it is a note bearing elegant script that reminds Eggsy of the way people wrote old letters.

_Wear this._

It’s a suit that is similar to Harry’s, dark navy pinstripe, navy and red striped tie, neat white pocket square, crisp white shirt, polished black oxfords. They fit him perfectly with all the workouts Eggsy’s been having to undergo. He feels like he’s putting on a dead man’s suit. He probably is.

There are familiar accessories too: the watch, the ring, the glasses. Eggsy slips those on last before he looks in the mirror and finds himself looking at a ghost.

“Hello, Galahad,” he says.

Harry waits, patient as ever, outside the changing rooms, and Eggsy can’t help but focus on Harry’s first reaction when he sees him. There’s a moment when he thinks Harry’s breath catches in his throat, a tightening around his eyes, the slightest clench of his jaw, but that is all. By the time Eggsy approaches him, Harry’s expression is back to neutrally pleasant.

"Your tie is slightly crooked," Harry says. "Shall I...?"

"Oh, sure, yeah," Eggsy says and then sucks in a breath as Harry draws in close to quietly adjust his barely remembered Windsor knot. He wants to say something, anything, to expel the sudden nervous tension that's taken up home in his stomach. "Learned it for a court appearance from a YouTube video."

“You're full of surprises," Harry says, then with a few more gentle tugs, he steps back to study his work. "How do you feel?”

Eggsy feels like _he_ should be asking Harry that. "Like a fucking fraud.”

A brief smile flickers across Harry’s lips. “I believe the appropriate phrase is, ‘fake it until you make it’?”

“Bit on the nose, that.”

“Come with me.” Harry lightly inclines his head, and they walk together through the rooms and halls of the mansion.

Eggsy has to admit, it feels different wearing a suit. It makes him walk taller, faster, and more confidently beside Harry. He glimpses their reflection in mirrors and windows and can’t help but admire how good they look together. Was this what it had been like for Galahad to walk beside his mentor? Did he feel this same nerve-wracking but strangely pleasurable sensation bloom in his stomach?

They sit across from each other on the shuttle, and with little else to look at, Eggsy simply finds himself staring at Harry, while Harry, in turn, gazes steadily back. They don’t speak, but it’s not uncomfortable.

It’s all a reverse of his first trip to Kingsman. Harry presses a call button for the dressing room lift and the ride up is equally as tedious as the ride down had been. Eggsy still feels anxious, though at least this time it’s not because he’s doing something wrong. Harry isn’t as talkative as James had been, but he is far more preferable company.

They enter a dark shop floor that has long since been closed for the day. Harry leads Eggsy up the short flight of stairs in the back, rounding the corner and throwing open the double doors for ultimate dramatic effect: the dining room. Eggsy steps in and pauses. It’s a large, rectangular table with many seats, but only two of them are filled by real people, Arthur and Lancelot. The rest are...holographic. Eggsy peers over the frames of his glasses just to be sure.

“Gentleman,” Harry announces to the room. “May I present Galahad the Third.”

He turns back to Eggsy and indicates the one empty chair to Arthur’s right that is filled by neither human nor projection. Galahad’s seat, it would seem. Eggsly slowly walks past Harry and sits down, trying to look as professional and put together as possible with so many eyes upon him.

Across from him is a hologram of a young, slender man with almost buoyant dark hair that is barely tamed by styling gel. He’d have a severe look but for the slight turned up corner of his mouth that could be taken for a smile when he looks back at Eggsy. To his left is Lancelot, who is more expressive with her warm gaze and affirming nod of welcome, but Eggsy notices with a frown that her eyes are swollen and red.

A flicker of movement pulls his attention away from her to the walls of the room, where he notices other older, besuited gentleman standing behind their younger counterparts at the table. The mentors, Eggsy thinks. The first generation. There isn't one for every agent, and in fact, the age range among those at the table varies from young to those who could be Harry's age. One mentor, however, is noticeably absent.

Lancelot's.

“I am assembling the table today to honour the passing of one of our own,” Arthur says, picking up a small glass filled with something amber coloured and holding it up.

Around the table, the agents do the same, hologram or not. Eggsy just stares at them, open-mouthed, before a light touch to his shoulder startles him. He glances back at Harry who nods to the place setting in front of him. Oh. It would seem he has a glass too. Eggsy picks it up and mimics the other agents.

“To James, the first Lancelot!” Arthur says.

“To James!” the agents chorus before bringing the glasses to their lips, and Eggsy is sharply reminded of the Kay clones back at the mansion.

Eggsy knocks back his own drink and barely manages to suppress a cough. The stuff _burns_ like hell and smells strong enough to make his eyes water.

“Fortunately, James has left behind a strong and talented successor,” Arthur says, nodding at Lancelot. “I am certain she will continue to maintain his legacy. Thank you, agents. That will be all, though I’d ask that Galahad stay behind for just a moment.”

One by one, the holograms disappear around the table and the silent pillars of the mentors standing around the room file out just as unobtrusively. Lancelot gives Eggsy a look he can’t sort, something lying between friendliness and exhaustion, before she too stands and leaves.

And then it’s just him and Harry left.

Arthur gives him a long, assessing look, and it’s every bit as withering as the first time he laid eyes upon Eggsy. “Merlin tells me you are doing well in your assessments. In prime physical fitness with no detected bugs as of yet. Your weapons scores rival those of some of our best agents. It pains me to say it, Galahad, but you may do well here after all.”

“Don’t seem all that difficult when your fellow clones are all dropping like flies,” Eggsy spits out.

“Galahad…” Harry warns softly from behind him.

“No, it’s quite alright,” Arthur says, giving Eggsy a humourless smile that comes off as more of a sneer. “The boy may have a point, after all. On average, the experiment group subjects do seem to possess less physical and psychological defects than our control group, even when raised under extreme circumstances. I do wonder why that is.”

“Maybe some things just don’t do well in captivity,” Eggsy says.

“Like your predecessor, you are very impulsive,” Arthur tells him. “Hopefully that trait will not be carried through to other actions he committed. Ah, Merlin, there you are. Come in.”

Before Eggsy can snap back a reply, Merlin enters the room and gives Eggsy a wordless warning before speaking. “I have the information you requested, Arthur.”

“Good. Gentleman, I am assigning our new Galahad here his first mission: to find out who killed James.”

“Pardon?” Harry says at the same time as Eggsy blurts out, “Fucking excuse me?”

“Consider it another assessment,” Arthur says, looking not at all apologetic. “A simple one to start out. Merlin, if you will throw it up on the screen?”

What had been a stuffy portrait of some old white bloke suddenly turns into a black screen that Merlin starts to populate with digital images and text. That’s when they learn the facts: James had been tracking some unusual movements around the globe, famous people and VIPs going missing (Eggsy does recall something about Iggy Azalea of all bloody people being a no-show at some awards show she was supposed to perform at, now that he thinks about it), random acts of violence committed by terrorists and armies, except what made it strange was that those attacks weren’t committed on another group so much as on _themselves_. James’s last transmission had been from Patagonia where he had been following a private outfit that had kidnapped a British university professor: _They’ve taken Professor Arnold_.

“That’s Dr James Arnold,” Merlin says, putting up a profile of the somewhat grizzly man in question. “A science professor from Imperial College who specialises in anthropogenic climate change and is a vocal proponent of Gaia Theory. Unfortunately, James wasn’t wearing his glasses, so we don’t know what happened, only that his vital signs flat-lined at 0300 this morning.”

“He hated wearing his glasses,” Harry remarks quietly. “Said they didn’t go with his overall style.”

Eggsy recalls how James attempted to fill every empty space with light-hearted banter and can’t help but agree. “So we find out where this Arnold bloke was taken and we find James’s killer?”

“But here’s where it gets strange,” Merlin says, and considering all the very strange shit currently going on around them, that must be saying something. “This is Professor Arnold earlier this afternoon outside of Imperial College after a lecture.”

On the screen, a grainy capture from a CC camera appears, depicting a very alive and very non-kidnapped Professor Arnold.

“Galahad, I want you to speak with this Professor Arnold and find out what he knows,” Arthur says. “As it’s your first time, your mentor will accompany you and take lead as necessary.”

“Don’t you think it’s too soon?” Harry questions. “He’s barely halfway through his assessments.”

“Call it another experiment now that the opportunity has presented itself,” Arthur says. “We’ve been making agents from our control groups for a long time, but maybe we’ve had it wrong. Galahad here will help to either prove or disprove that in time. Oh, and Galahad? If you are considering taking a cue from your late father and committing treasonous acts against the organisation, remember that we know where you come from and who you care about. I believe there’s still a mother in the picture, isn’t there? Perhaps a younger half-sister. Do we have an understanding?”

“Perfectly,” Eggsy grounds out, clenching his hands into fists below the table.

“Good. You will visit Professor Arnold tomorrow, then. For tonight, you are dismissed.”

The ride back on the shuttle is just as quiet, but far more brooding. Eggsy finally snaps under the tension. “You didn’t get to do the toast to James. None of the mentors did.”

“We are no longer active agents,” Harry says. “It is not within our right.”

“That’s stupid. You fucking knew him better than any of them babies in suits sitting around that table had done.”

Harry sighs. “It’s just how things are, Eggsy.”

“Did you lot toast Galahad when he died?”

“No,” Harry says tightly.

“No? Why the fuck not?”

“Galahad ended his own life, therefore he was considered to have died without honour,” Harry answers, not looking at him. “We do not honour those who do not honour themselves.”

“Starting to think he had more honour than all of us put together,” Eggsy mutters.

Harry doesn’t reply.


	6. Chapter 6

_There is only power. Power is of the individual mind but the mind's power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end and only might is right._

 

_____

 

Imperial College, like so many parts of London nowadays, is a mishmash of old and new architecture with Classical structures at the centre and transitioning into modern blocks of steel and glass as it sprawls outward. Eggsy isn’t particularly concerned about the perils of London losing its character and sense of history, he’s just happy to be back in it.

He’s missed his city with all its sights and sounds and smells and people. To him, London has always been a heaving beast beneath his feet. Its streets were its arteries, its people and vehicles were its living, breathing cells. He didn’t think he’d get the chance to be back here again anytime soon.

It leaves him craning his neck every which way like an overexcited tourist beside Harry on their short walk across the campus. After all, this is probably the closest to uni he’ll ever get. Harry remains as placid and unaffected by his surroundings as ever, though it’s got to be just as long, if not longer, since he got to leave Kingsman’s grounds as well.

They enter the Royal School of Mines half an hour before Professor Arnold is scheduled to give another lecture. Research into the man’s patterns and behaviours revealed a mind that was, at best, scattered, but Arnold was passionate about teaching and always arrived at least twenty minutes early to his classes in order to prepare.

Still, Arnold’s classroom, theatre-style and larger than Eggsy would have guessed, is empty when Eggsy and Harry locate it. At the front of the classroom are old school style blackboards and actual honest to god chalk, but Eggsy’s more fascinated by the chaotic scrawl of numbers and formulas written across nearly every available bit of space on the board itself. It’s almost intimidating for its sheer mass, but it could be detailing the most ideal ratio of beans on toast for all Eggsy knew.

He glances at Harry with a smirk, nodding to the board. “Can you understand this?”

“Of course,” Harry immediately says, causing Eggsy to do a double-take and then turn back to the board with alarm.

“What? Really?” Was he supposed to have learned this too? Did he miss the memo? His first assignment and he was already fucking it up, typical—

The corner of Harry’s mouth minutely twitches.

“Oh, fuck off!” Eggsy says with more relief than heat. “You had me going for a minute there.”

“As an agent who must travel far and wide and encounter any number of people, it is impossible to know everything about every topic under the sun,” Harry says. “But it significantly benefits you to convince others that you do.”

Eggsy is prevented from giving a reply, however, when the classroom door opens and Professor Arnold enters. The man is smaller in person than he seemed on camera, but still catering to every ounce the absent-minded professor stereotype down to the tweed jacket and slightly dishevelled appearance; he’s already muttering to himself, and only notices Eggsy and Harry when he’s nearly right in front of them.

“Oh!” Arnold stops and almost rears back. “Hullo! May I help you with something?”

“Yes,” Eggsy says in his smoothest received pronunciation. “We actually have a question about anthropogenic force.”

Of course, Eggsy had earlier questioned whether two men in really nice suits randomly dropping by a classroom to ask questions about a highly esoteric subject would be suspicious or not, but that fact doesn’t appear to cross the professor’s mind. This time, Arnold’s “Oh!” is more delighted as he eagerly rushes forward to greet them. “Well, you’ve certainly come to the right person then! What is it you would like to know?”

He’s so genuinely passionate about his favourite subject that Eggsy hasn’t the heart to carry on the ruse. “No, I’m sorry. Actually, we came to ask you about the period of time for which you were recently missing. Nearly two weeks, Professor. You were a no-show for several classes and even a paid speaking opportunity.”

This does much to put a damper on the professor’s enthusiasm. Eggsy can practically see the light go out of his eyes, replaced with suspicion and not a little panic. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arnold says. His movements become agitated as he scurries to the blackboard and begins erasing all the equations there like they’re either meaningless or highly confidential. Who knows? Perhaps they were.

“As I already told administration,” Arnold says before dropping the eraser back on the ledge and picking up a stick of chalk to start furiously writing in the space he had just cleared. “I had suddenly taken ill and by the time I had even a shred of my head back on my shoulders, weeks had regrettably passed.”

But Eggsy isn’t pay attention to the man’s words. His focus is glued to what Arnold has written on the board.

_THEY’RE LISTENING_

“I see,” Harry smoothly interjects, not missing a beat. “In that case, we apologise for having taken up your time, especially seeing as how there was a gentleman waiting outside to speak with you about classes for next term. I believe he was from the Dean’s office?”

Arnold’s eyes light up in understanding, and Eggsy can see his shoulders sink in relief. “Ah, thank you for informing me. I had better go see him now before class starts.”

They walk up the aisle in single file, Harry at the front, followed by Arnold, and Eggsy bringing up the rear. They emerge out into the hall and keep walking out of the building and across the large square, past students and tourists and preoccupied professors milling about.

There’s a black Kingsman taxi waiting for them at the kerb, and Harry doesn’t pause until he opens the rear door and ushers them all in. It’s a bit of a tight squeeze, but once the door is shut behind him, Harry turns to the professor, raises his wrist as if to check the time, except something else flies out of his watch instead and embeds itself in Arnold’s neck.

In less time than it takes for Eggsy to blink in shock, the professor slumps over into Eggsy’s lap.

“Please tell me you didn’t just k—,” Eggsy starts before remember that they may be under at audio surveillance, so instead he focuses on trying to shift Arnold around to find his pulse.

“That would be rather counterproductive, don’t you think?” Harry says, merely raising his brows.

They don’t speak for the rest of the trip back to the shop. Together, Eggsy and Harry carry Arnold in with one arm around their shoulders each, like they’re simply helping a mate who’s had one too many. There’s no one in the shop anyway—briefly, Eggsy wonders if Kingsman ever sees any actual customers—and Arnold remains unconscious for the whole leg of the journey back to the mansion.

Once they step off the shuttle, Eggsy follows Harry’s lead, and where Arnold ends up is on a patch of bare floor in an empty, windowless grey room with thick walls that have an odd effect on the acoustics. Every sound feels significantly dampened.

“A Kingsman-modified Faraday cage to prevent any and all signals from coming in or getting out,” Harry explains once he closes the door. “Whatever surveillance devices that are on his person won’t transmit from here. We can speak freely and perhaps now learn the truth.”

“Whenever he wakes up,” Eggsy remarks dubiously, staring down at the snoring man at his feet. “What the fuck did you give him?”

“A light tranquiliser with amnesiac properties. I think we’ve had enough strangers knowing how to access our very secret agency of late. At any rate, he won’t remember having first met us, but given how initially willing he was to talk to us despite the threat he was under, I shan’t think it would take too much convincing to get him to speak the second time around.”

And, in fact, it isn’t. Once they calm Arnold down a second time and give him assurances that no, he is not in trouble, yes, they are the legal authorities investigating his kidnapping, and especially that there is no way _they_ would be able to hear him now, he sings like a bird.

“Oh thank goodness,” Arnold sighs, sagging against the wall. He remains perfectly content to remain sitting on the ground. “Those people are absolutely insane, I tell you. One moment I was walking into my flat, and the next I am being carted off to the mountains of some god-forsaken place and being told my biggest fan wants to meet me! You can imagine what I was thinking, wondering if I was about to be strapped to a bed and have my feet mutilated, but then all of a sudden this gentleman arrives and kills everyone! He was wearing a very nice suit, much like you two actually….”

Eggsy and Harry trade a quick look, but the professor is already preoccupied with recounting his tale.

“He tells me he’s there to rescue me, only to be taken out by yet another arrival, this, this...tiny woman, except she had _blades_ for feet—”

“Are you saying this woman killed that gentleman?” Harry asks.

“What? No! I mean, not at the time. She was very fast though. Injected him with something that immediately put him under. She said he was too useful to kill right away.” The professor shudders.

“James—er, the gentleman’s still alive?” Eggsy asks hopefully.

The look on Arnold’s face can only be described as haunted. “I doubt it. They took me to some other place. I don’t know where, they wouldn’t let me see. It was a science facility and they were performing experiments. On people! It was monstrous. They said the world wouldn’t even miss the gentleman. That he wasn’t even considered a real person. And then they...they cut into him. They took things out of him and...and such. They tried to keep him alive as long as possible. He was in and out of consciousness. We were prisoners together. He was a very chatty fellow the entire time, tried to put on a brave face, but by the end of it...by the end of it....”

Eggsy wants to vomit. He turns away from Arnold and paces to the other end of the room, pressing his palms flat against the cool surface of the wall, and then his forehead. He wishes he had paid more attention to James. Offered him a friendlier word. He wishes so many things.

“You say _they_. Who else was there besides the woman?” Harry continues to question calmly.

“There was a man. I think he was very famous? I know it sounds too incredible to believe. I know you probably think I’m crazy, but I recognised him from the news and even from some academic circles. Richmond Valentine. It was Richmond Valentine who was there with me.”

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_You’ll be happy to know I visited the library today without your prompting. And no, it was not for some nefarious purpose. I genuinely wanted to do some research. Mostly just history. Our history. To understand the future, we must understand the past, right?_

_We had such a noble mandate, did we not? To preserve humanity for a brighter future. To make sure that events of such devastating magnitude as World War I would never be allowed to come to pass again. Of course, then World War II occurred soon after. We do not always succeed, do we?_

_I was reading about the first Galahad, that venerable progenitor of our line. Sir Robert Wellsley. Absurdly wealthy. Handsome in that old fashioned sort of way. Did not much care for the facial hair he seemed quite fond of. He outlived both his wives. Not a single one of his five sons survived the Great War. To have all those material possessions, and yet to be bereft in all the things that truly mattered. He completed over forty-two missions, An unprecedented 85% of which were successful. He had been taken captive over twenty times, tortured for nearly all of them, and yet only lost, cumulatively, three fingers and two toes. They say he was more reckless in his latter years, and yet nothing could kill him but a mundane automobile crash in 1948. He was extremely inebriated, it had turned out. It was on the anniversary of the Armistice._

_You can hear everyone at Kingsman whisper and mutter at times that no matter how hard they try to isolate the gene and breed it out of us, recklessness continues to live in our blood. A strange sort of resilience too, I would gather. I think I understand it, though. We skirt the edges of death as if desperately searching for the meaning of life._

_I have not completed forty-two missions yet, but I think I am starting to learn what that is, Harry. When I am home, I get to wake up to it. I see it across from me at the breakfast table or over afternoon tea or when I am read to or when the rare English sun shines brilliantly in the sun room and warms us. When I have to redo my crooked ties. When I have a nightmare. Or, when you do._

_I find myself looking less and less to my missions for that sense of life and more to what is around me here at home. To my utter surprise and immense delight, it is enough. It is abundant._

_Yours,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

“He gave Arnold a choice. Either agree to Valentine’s conditions to have the implant installed and never discuss what had transpired in return for being allowed to go back to his daily life, or refuse and remain his guest. Given all he had witnessed, Arnold was very reluctant to remain at the facility where he was being kept,” Harry explains to their small audience.

They are gathered around a now sedated Arnold and a Kingsman surgeon, the protected room having been converted into a makeshift operating theatre. Perhaps it wasn’t the most sanitary conditions for surgery, however minor said surgery was, but no one else seemed particularly concerned.

“And this implant,” Merlin says, eyes rapt upon the light pink scar behind Arnold’s ear as the doctor reopens it with a scalpel, “is equipped with audio capabilities to monitor what he was doing?”

“Arnold said he didn’t know precisely what the device did, only that it would keep him protected from, and I quote, ‘what was to come’, and that Valentine warned him there would be swift and severe consequences should he break confidentiality.”

Eggsy grimaces when the skin flaps are peeled back and the doctor begins to widen the gash with a pair of forceps in order to explore what lay underneath. The wet sounds sounds alone make him want to back away from the table, but he just grips the edges of it more firmly until his knuckles turn white.

“We’ll study the implant and keep Arnold under 24/7 security for the time being,” Merlin says, his gaze lighting up when the doctor slowly unveils a small metal chip with long, thin wires still connected _inside_. “Arthur won’t like hearing that name crop up again.”

“This is as far as I can risk pulling out the chip,” the doctor informs them, “without inflicting possible brain damage. There’s wiring directly connected to his brain and it’s been too tightly integrated for clean removal. I can cut off the connections here and here for the time being, though, and we can consider further options for removing the rest of the wiring at a later point should he desire it.”

“I think he should be happy to simply have the implant out of his body,” Harry says, nodding to the doctor to snip the chip’s wires.

Eggsy finds himself holding his breath the entire time, wondering if it would be like those terrible bomb defusing scenes in the films where cutting the wrong wire would lead to a fiery and explosive end. Of course it’s nothing like that at all. The doctor neatly cuts the wires, drops the bloody chip into a waiting metal basin, and that’s that.

“You lot act like you know something about Valentine already.” Eggsy finally puts voice to what’s been troubling him this whole time. It was the way Harry’s face had closed off when he heard it. The way Merlin, when he was called in, remained grim faced and tight lipped. “Care to share with the rest of the class?”

“Richmond Valentine was one of Kingsman’s most brilliant scientists, long before your father came along,” Harry says, and yeah, there’s a long story there that Eggsy suspects does not end happily. “He and Arthur once shared a vision.”

Richmond Valentine, Eggsy comes to find out, had been directly recruited into Kingsman upon earning his bachelor’s, master’s, _and_ doctorate from MIT in four years. Like Lee Unwin, Valentine had been lured in with promises of being able to change the world and bettering human lives and, more crucially, having the resources to actually do it.

But the fissures in a supposedly unified goal started early on. Kingsman was well into its biological and genetics research, while Valentine, whose computer science and biomed background grounded much of his thinking, was of the opinion that technology would be the key to improving humanity.

It wasn’t that Kingsman was averse to technology, certainly not, but its attitude towards progress and those who deserved first access still remained old-fashioned and even quite backwards. So much so that Valentine found himself parting ways with the organisation after just a few years to found his own company, what was to be known worldwide as V-Corp. The parting had been less than amenable, but Valentine had made himself too prominent and too influential to be dispatched in the quiet, almost offhanded manner that Lee had been.

And so V-Corp rose to fame and fortune primarily for its biotechnology and prosthetics for everything from enhanced cochlear implants that allowed the deaf to hear (as controversial as they were), to giving amputees better options for mobility, to more effectively managing certain illnesses if not outright eliminating them through intramuscular chips that could deliver precise dosages of medications via controlled release mechanisms. Within a decade, Valentine became the biotech and pharmaceutical world’s darling.

It was only in the twenty-first century that V-Corp began to diversify its offerings into the consumer electronics space: mobile phones and devices, laptops and desktops, portable audio devices and the like. There, too, it grew to become a behemoth to rival the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung.

“He’s a philanthropist who maintains several charitable foundations for third-world poverty, malaria, hunger, education, and sustainability. He’s publicly vowed to never bring his company’s money overseas and therefore pays the full American corporate tax, claiming they are excessively low anyway. He’s a celebrity. I believe there there’s a forthcoming biopic of his life that’s been receiving critical acclaim,” Merlin finishes once they are safely ensconced in his private offices.

“And he just so happens to kidnap people and put chips in them as a, what, side hobby?” Eggsy asks, because after all of that, it does sound pretty incredible were it not for the proof right in front of their noses.

“People like Valentine who experience such massive success and nearly ubiquitous praise on a worldwide scale often develop messianic complexes. Whatever he’s trying to do, he probably thinks he’s saving the world,” Harry says. “There are other rumours that Valentine is a leading proponent of the underground transhumanist movement. He encourages self-experimentation and modification in the very most literal sense, using any and all manner of technology to do it. He may even be funding several organisations that offer such...services.”

“Ah, the neo-evolutionist movement,” Merlin says, tapping at his tablet to pull up new data on the nearby screen. “It’s been heavily embraced by a certain demographic of young adults who often feel alienated from mainstream society. They’ve certainly taken to worshipping Valentine to near divine levels.”

“Fucking hell.” The images that flash across Merlin’s screen are nothing short of morbidly fascinating: people who intentionally cut off or mutilate parts of themselves and replace them with metallic appendages and the like. An abundance of tattoos, earrings, and plugs. Industrial goth aesthetic appeared to be the general theme. People who had modified themselves to look like animals. One girl looked to have an entirely bionic eye. “Looks like someone took _The Matrix_ a bit too seriously.”

“In fact,” Merlin says, continuing to type swiftly on his tablet. “Valentine arrived in London this morning for the premiere of the film about his life. If past patterns are anything to go by, it’s very likely he’ll pay a visit to one of his preferred clubs while he’s in town for a brief stop as he is often rumoured to do. If we can get an agent inside, we may be able to learn more about what he’s been up to.”

“No,” Harry immediately says, causing both Eggsy and Merlin to look at him. “I already know what you’re thinking, Merlin. He’s not ready, especially not on his own.”

“What? I can do it!” Eggsy argues.

“Valentine would recognise you the moment he sees any Gen One, Harry,” Merlin reasons. “And while I know you can blend in with many situations and environments, I think this particular event may call for...something a touch more specialised.”

“Specialised?” Eggsy asks.

“You’ve seen a few examples of their preferred style.”

“Oh, fuck no,” Eggsy flatly says. “I’m not putting plugs in my ears or needles in my eye. No fucking way, mate.”

Merlin winces. “Perhaps not to that extreme. But certainly capturing some of the more superficial elements will go a long way to ensuring a modicum of camouflage. I was thinking that Lancelot may also be a good accompaniment for this mission, if that would assuage your concerns, Harry.”

Eggsy can see from Harry’s expression that it doesn’t, but Harry only curtly nods, which Merlin takes and runs with. “I’ll alert Lancelot. Now if you don’t mind, some of us have a last minute mission to put together. You know, the real work. Off you go.”

“So, wait. By camouflage, he don’t mean...I’m not...going to have to wear vinyl trousers or summat, right?” Eggsy hesitantly asks when they are walking out of Merlin’s office.

“Needs must, Eggsy,” Harry says, giving Eggsy one of his own smirks right back at him.

 

_____

 

The interior of the rather aptly named Neolution nightclub is about what Eggsy expects: barraging industrial and glitch music, wide screen monitors with questionable digital art, strobing lights, and some combination of leather, metal, vinyl, and plastic clothing as far as the eye can see.

What makes it so unusual is just how _much_ metal exists and the unusual forms it takes upon people’s bodies as people seek to turn themselves into half-man, half-machine.

“Charming,” is all Lancelot says after one sweep around the club. With her dark, heavy makeup and a bare scrap of black plastic passing as a dress, she’s one of the more conservatively dressed patrons.

 _Eyes on_ all _of your surroundings, Galahad_ , Harry says in his ear, and Eggsy jerks his gaze from Lancelot’s tall stiletto boot-clad legs back up to the crowds. Right, he’s wearing the glasses. He’s also wearing clothes that cling to him so tightly as to be indecent, but he’s trying not to think about that right now.

 _Split up and cover the room_ , Merlin instructs. _Find out if Valentine is coming and who he might talk to. Reconnaissance only._

“Copy that, Merlin,” Lancelot says, then to Eggsy, “I’ll talk to the bartenders and bouncers, you should circulate and try to find who the frequent patrons are.”

It was a sound plan as most of the club’s staff were men who were happily eying up the women on the floor as it was. Eggsy and Lancelot gradually part, letting the crowds pull them off into different directions: Lancelot, to the bar, Eggsy to the outer edges of the room where people are immersed in conversation, and in some cases, other risque activities.

Eggsy is stopped in his tracks as he watches a woman thread black string into another woman’s bare back, creating a spinal corset of sorts but with _skin_. “Jesus,” he mutters.

 _Focus_ , Harry reminds him.

He shakes himself away from the frighteningly engrossing sight and continues walking, trying to pick up on the traces of conversation beneath the rumbling drone of the speakers.

“We remove all the bones from the fingers—” Gross.

“—n we’ll be able to change eye colours like people change their clothes—” What was wrong with plain old contacts?

“—restore vestigial traits! Bring back the tail, I say!” Alright, monkey lover.

“—e’s having a remote sense implanted in her arm to control her house and—” You have to dare to dream a little bigger, darling.

“—you believe in clones?”

Eggsy nearly trips over his own two feet, but manages to round a pillar and lean against it in order to listen more closely.

“What, like Dolly?” a girl asks.

“No, like human. Real human clones.”

“I’ve heard nothing about that.”

“There’s rumours they exist now in some secret underground facility.” Eggsy breath freezes in his lungs. “Used for organ harvesting and the like.”

“I know we’re supposed to make the impossible possible, but you watch too much telly, mate.”

He almost rolls his eyes as he pushes away from the pillar, turning and nearly running right into a woman. “Woah, sorry there, luv.”

“The fault is mine,” she says in a thickly accented voice, and Eggsy is caught by the way her dark, glittering eyes bore into him. She’s got a perfectly sliced dark fringe across her forehead, matched by an equally severe length of hair that falls just past her shoulders. Like the other club goers, she wears black. Unlike the other club goers, her clothing is simple, breathable material, three-quarter sleeves and slim-fitting leggings that tuck into—

 _Her feet_ , Harry hisses, as if Eggsy can’t see for himself. They’re rather hard to miss.

Instead of some ridiculously high heeled shoe that most of the women in the club favour, this one has wickedly sharp bladed prosthetics that catch the flashing lights of the room.

“Ah, hullo…” he stammers.

“Gazelle,” she says, holding out her hand.

Eggsy takes it and can feel the strength of those fingers close in around his. “Eggsy.”

“You must be new here, Eggsy.”

“Really? How do you figure that?”

“You have the same expression as people who look at animals in a zoo.”

“I…” So much for blending in, bit Eggsy isn’t a world-class blagger for nothing. “Yeah, guess you got me there.” He smiles ruefully, but makes sure it isn’t _too_ repentant. “Friend of mine told me about this place and what goes on here. I was interested. It sounds like a bunch of pseudo-sci-fi shit, but I like the idea, you know? Of being something _more_. Reckon it beats anything I’ve got going on.”

Gazelle studies him through almost sleepy eyes, but beneath her long, thick lashes is the gaze of a dangerous predator. Eggsy can feel it in his very bones, prickling along his neck. He tries to remain guileless under her scrutiny.

“Do you really want to learn more?” she finally asks.

Eggsy shrugs helplessly. “Do I look like I’ve got anything to lose?”

A brief smirk flickers across her lips as if she were accepting the challenge Eggsy had unwittingly issued. “Come with me,” she says, pivoting on one sharply pointed blade and striding towards the back of the club in a light clang of metal on cement.

Eggsy follows easily in her wake, because people seem to naturally shift away from her as if sensing a shark moving in their waters, and only he is foolish enough to follow the trail of blood.

 _I’m alerting Lancelot as to what’s happening. Be careful, Galahad_ , Merlin says, and that’s comforting, at least.

Gazelle leads him down a hallway that is populated by more big bouncer types, nodding at them when they only lower their gazes like submissive animals, and through a series of darkened rooms with only the faintest illumination of _things_ moving in the shadows. Eggsy clenches his teeth because he feels like his heart will leap out of his throat, keeping his eyes firmly on Gazelle’s thick curtain of hair swinging behind her.

At last, the journey ends in a room that Eggsy senses is at the very edges of the building. Gazelle gives him one last look and then moves off to the side to take up an uncanny impression of a statue. The air is significantly cooler, and there’s a smoky sweet haze, undoubtedly produced from the proliferation of bongs being passed around the sleepily gathered crowd.

“Well, well, well,” says a lulling voice to Eggsy’s right, and when he turns to locate its source, he sees none other than Richmond Valentine sitting dead centre of the group. “Who do we have here? You smoke, man?”

“Nah, thanks.” Eggsy does, in fact, smoke, and before Kingsman, quite often, but he doubts accepting a hit now could be justified as simply wanting to blend in. “Hey, ain’t you—”

“Let’s not worry about names right now, okay? Tonight I’m just like you, a man who questions everything about himself and the world he lives in,” Valentine says, unfurling his hands wide as a trail of smoke streams from his lips.

“Right,” Eggsy drawls, slowly approaching and taking a seat on the very edge of one of the lounges. “Gazelle said you could give me answers.”

“Answers? More questions probably.” Valentine grins. “You know, for the first twenty years of my life, I had a really bad lisp. Got made fun of all throughout school and college. ‘Wichy’ they used to call me. Hated it. Kids do mean stuff all the time though, but it sticks with you. It’s like they’re born with it. Sometimes I think we’re nothing more than cruel animals and it’s only society’s rules that are imposed upon us to keep us in check.”

“How’d you overcome it?” Eggsy asks. There’s no trace of a lisp in Valentine’s words now. His voice is as deep and smooth as a recording.

In answer, Valentine tips his chin up and runs a finger under his jaw. At first, Eggsy tenses in alarm, but then he can see the barest trace of a faint line that mars his dark skin. “My own invention, surgically implanted. It forces my tongue to carry out the correct movements in my mouth in order to produce the correct sounds. Yeah, a little bit of speech therapy after, but nothing compared to the usual methods. This, my man, is years of bullying resolved in a matter of a few weeks if you’re just willing to open yourself up to the possibilities.”

“Literally,” Eggsy murmurs.

“We’re just speeding up what nature is already doing. A lot more humanely too, I might add. We actively reach out to help our weakest brethren. In nature, the weakest don’t survive.”

“That right?” Eggsy says, feeling a low-burning thread of anger start curling in his gut that’s quickly overriding his sense of caution. “Guess it’s a fine line between who you consider your brethren to be in the first place, bruv.”

“Ah, there you are.” Valentine grins, his teeth gleaming white. “You know, I thought I recognised those glasses. Couldn’t be too sure at first. Real popular style these days, right? So I had Gazzy here bring you in for a closer look.”

 _Eggsy_ , Harry warns. _Leave now._

“You people are like termites, you know? You see one and you just know there’s more under the surface.” Valentine leans forward, arms pitched over his knees as he looks Eggsy in the eye. “You, though. You’re a new one, aren’t you? I don’t believe I’ve seen you before. They finally working on upgrades, right? Fix the bugs in the old version. That was the problem we were having with our mutual friend, if you catch my meaning. His DNA? More bugs in the code than you would believe. He would have died of cancer in a few years anyway. But you, now you seem very promising. I can’t wait to open you up to the possibilities.”

_Eggsy!_

He senses movement behind him, the slightest breeze across the back of his neck. It’s all the warning he has to throw himself to the side, narrowly avoiding getting impaled by a sharp blade where his right shoulder had been. Following that wicked gleam of metal, Eggsy looks up to find Gazelle looming over him with the same expression she had when first greeting him, like a smug cat casually batting at her prey.

They both move at the same time, him diving over the coffee table and clearing it of its drug paraphernalia, and her over the lounge in a second ultra precise attempt to skewer him. He grabs at whatever his hands can get a hold of (a ridiculously large bong) and hurls it at Gazelle with his excellently scored marksmanship, but she handles it in the same manner in which she seems to approach everything: by cleanly slicing it in two.

“Now this is what I’m talking about!” Valentine enthusiastically says while the rest of the people around him barely register a reaction. “Gen One’s couldn’t hope to keep up with Gazzy, but kid, you got some reflexes.”

The next object his hands land on is a copy of _On the Origin of Species_ (how cliche), which Eggsy brings up in time to shield himself from another lancing blow as he scrambles back, desperate to put more distance between them, but her next attack neatly bisects even that thick book with little trouble.

He’s left to duck her next deadly kicks, but when his back hits the wall and he can retreat no further, he realises with dreadful certainty that he’s done for, and that he’s going to have to die in this fucking awful outfit too.

The killing blow, however, is surmounted by a rocking explosion that sends everyone off their feet in a shower of concrete, glass, and smoke. Eggsy throws his arms over his head to shield himself from the raining debris, only to feel arms tugging at him, trying to pull him up.

“Come on, we’ve got to go, Galahad!” Lancelot shouts at him through the ringing in his ears, and when Eggsy realises it’s her, he nearly lets himself sag in relief except they have to hurry.

The hall is miraculously free of obstacles, either human or destroyed structural element, and they push their way through the smoke and shouting to the back exit. When they emerge out into the night, Eggsy takes in a big gulp of smoke-free oxygen and almost kisses the blacktop.

— _ggsy! Eggsy, are you alright? Answer me!_ comes Harry’s insistent voice.

“Fine, I’m fine,” Eggsy croaks at last, sharing a long _I can’t believe we survived_ look with Lancelot. A thick rivulet of blood sluggishly trickles down the side of her face from a cut at her scalp. “I’m sorry. I fucked it up.”

_No, Eggsy, you did well. I am proud of you._

And fuck if that didn’t feel really good in spite of it all.


	7. Chapter 7

_They made me see that the world was beautiful if you were beautiful, and that you couldn't get unless you gave. And you had to give without wanting to get._

 

_____

 

Eggsy knows he probably should have shot off at the mouth by now, but every time he parts his lips to speak, he can’t think of anything to say, so he just remains quiet as he watches Harry carefully pour the tea. He feels a bit stupid for admiring the way Harry serves breakfast, but he can’t help it. There is elegance and efficiency written into every movement, from the way he strains the loose tea leaves without spilling a drop (because Harry refuses to use bagged anything) to cutting up his eggs into precise geometric slices and somehow not getting yolk all over the plate and himself.

Just as Eggsy finds himself without much desire to make conversation, so too has gone his appetite, resulting in him mindlessly pushing food around his plate. He’s made just about a complete hash of Harry’s so beautifully laid out breakfast when he realises Harry is staring at him.

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly, setting down his fork and staring at the mess in front of him. At his feet, JB butts his cold, wet nose against his ankle and whimpers, and when Eggsy glances down, he's looking up at him with big, brown pleading eyes.

“No,” Harry says before Eggsy can even so much as reach for his slice of bacon. “You’re suppose to be training JB. The only thing he’ll learn by you giving in now is that he can beg you for food later.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not currently on the receiving end of the face he’s giving me.”

But Harry remains unimpressed. “Think of it as tough love. Human food isn’t good for dogs anyway.”

“At least it wouldn’t be going to waste,” Eggsy admits, sitting back as if to admit defeat.

Something in Harry’s posture softens. The more Eggsy thinks about it, the more he realises how much Harry speaks in gestures than he does in words. “You should try to keep your strength up. You’ve still a long day of training ahead of you. And judging by those dark circles beneath your eyes, you didn’t get much sleep either.”

“No. Was too wired. Every time I closed my eyes, I could swear them feet were gonna gut me like a fish.” Eggsy sighs and tiredly rubs his eyes. Now he’s left with an exhaustion-induced headache and a queasy stomach. “I don’t know how to do this, pretend like everything’s okay after that.”

“This is an unusual situation, I will admit.” Though Eggsy isn’t sure to which part Harry is referring—how he earned his status, his lack of training, or the whole fucking situation—because _unusual_ was, to put it lightly, a bit of an understatement. “I was...worried you weren’t ready. It’s not easy, what we do, but that’s why we do it, so that others may be spared.”

“But why do we gotta be the sacrificial ones? No one even gave us a choice.”

“No one asks a hammer if it wants to drive in the nail.”

“Yeah, but we’re not tools, Harry. We’re human beings.” Eggsy frowns when Harry just fiddles with the delicate handle of his teacup. “You truly believe that, right? That you’re a living, breathing, thinking person with a will of your own?”

The fact that Harry even visibly hesitates makes Eggsy alarmed, but before he can speak again, there’s a knock at the door, and Harry maybe too willingly jumps to answer it. While his back is turned, Eggsy defiantly slips his hand below the table to feed his bacon to JB, who gobbles it up in three snaps of his jaw.

When Harry returns, he brings Merlin with him. “Eggsy,” he greets. “Good work last night.”

“Didn’t much feel like it.”

“We know more than we did before, and that’s not nothing. But that’s not what I came here to talk about. Glasses, gentleman.” As both Harry and Eggsy slip on their glasses, the portrait of some sort of picturesque rural countryside above Harry’s fireplace turns into yet another blank digital canvas. “We were alerted to Valentine making a surprise appearance at today’s TechSummit conference in London. He’s on stage now.”

They watch Valentine’s entire ten-minute presentation as he gifts his free SIM cards to the world in perpetuity, drenched in cool purples and slick animated titles. Valentine is an equally polished and charismatic speaker on stage as he is in person, Eggsy idly notes, possibly because Valentine really believes in what he’s saying, and the fire of that passion shines in his eyes. The live audience must feel it too because they give him an energetic standing ovation when his speech is over. Then again, giving the world free internet and mobile service would make anyone go a bit swoony.

“Rewind it just a bit,” Harry sudden says. Merlin gives him only the barest questioning look before doing so.

Eggsy watches the camera pan backwards from where Valentine is leaving the stage to the podium where a professionally-dressed woman is clapping.

“Stop,” Harry says, and the screen freezes on the woman, turned away from the camera and set in profile. Eggsy tries to look for what’s got Harry’s attention, but it looks just like a normal businesswoman to him.

“There, behind the ear,” Harry points out, and once he does, Eggsy wants to smack himself for not seeing it earlier.

“The same scar as Arnold,” Merlin says before glancing down at his tablet. “Speaking of which, we’ve received the analysis report of his implant. At first blush, we thought it to be a simple receiver and transmitter, but it’s also equipped with the ability to superheat the soft tissue of the body very rapidly.”

“What’s that mean?” Eggsy is almost afraid to ask.

“Well, given its location, if activated, I imagine it would at the very least completely fry one’s brain within one’s skull, possibly even making the head explode.”

“That’s just rank!”

“And a good safeguard to assure blanket silence over whatever Valentine is planning,” Harry adds. “Which we still don’t know.”

“But he knows we’re onto him now,” Eggsy says, feeling like a failure all over again. “He’s gonna be even more careful from here on out.”

“So we don’t hide it anymore,” Harry says. “We go in with all our cards on the table.”

“What are you thinking?” Merlin asks, brows furrowing.

“I’ll approach Valentine directly.”

Both Eggsy and Merlin stare at him.

“Oh fuck no!” Eggsy immediately says. “He’ll cut you open just to see what makes you tick!”

“Harry,” Merlin hesitates, “You know what they did to James.”

“I’m quite aware of the risks, yes, thank you,” Harry tells him, narrowing his eyes at them. “But if Valentine now knows the flaws of our generation, then I can offer him something more valuable than just another body to dissect: information on Kingsman itself.”

“And what makes you think he’ll bite?”

“I think I can come up with a convincing case for defection,” Harry says, refusing to look at Eggsy.

 

_____

 

There’s eight of them wedged into the back of the jump plane, all dressed in standard issue black Kingsman skydiving gear, which also includes helmets with readout displays. The original three, as Eggsy has privately taken to calling them, still remain as insufferable as ever, and therefore the most easily identifiable for the smug expressions ever present on their faces and the way they always congregate together during every training activity. The other three, whose designations he can’t even recall and, in all honestly, never bothered to learn, betray various degrees of anxiousness.

Not him though, Eggsy knows, because he can’t keep the smile off his face. This next exercise he’s quite excited about.

“Listen up,” Merlin says over the comms. “The mission is to land in the target without the radar detecting you. If I read you on the radar or you miss the target, you automatically fail. Is that understood?”

More than, considering what _failure_ seemed to mean around these parts.

When Merlin alerts them that they’re approaching the drop zone and the warning light flips from red to green, Eggsy, who purposely chose to sit at the end so he can be the first one out, jumps up and impatiently waits for the hatch to lower, revealing in increments a cloudless blue sky and the green English countryside below.

He doesn’t hesitate to run down the ramp and take a flying leap into the air, spreading out his arms and legs, soaring through the sky without restraint. His only regret is that he can’t feel the air on his face, but that’s alright, it’s heady enough as it is, seeing the world from this god-like perspective with trees and houses no bigger than insects, feeling like he could stay up here forever.

In his ear, the sounds of the Kay clones flood the comms, shouts and exclamations of unbridled joy and exhilaration in a way that is so painfully human, even Eggsy can’t help but throw his voice into the fray. Around him, the clones twist and somersault in the air, drawing their limbs inward to rapidly spin in circles or spreading them out wide to simply glide. For once, the competition doesn’t feel cutthroat so much as playful.

“My, my, you’re all very cheerful,” Merlin’s voice suddenly cuts in. “Did you really think it was going to be that straightforward? Any idiot can read a heads-up display. A Kingsman agent needs to be able to solve problems under pressure, like what to do when half your group doesn’t have parachutes.”

If his stomach hadn’t already felt like it were dropping, Eggsy reckons it would be sick with dread. What had been shouts and whoops of happiness quickly devolve into cries of fear and outrage.

Suddenly the plunge towards the earth is no longer so exciting as it is terrifying.

"What are we supposed to do?" one of the clones shouts.

“Remember your training,” Merlin says. “Aim for the target, come in under the radar.”

“Look, I’ve got a plan!” Eggsy tries to cut through the panicked chatter. “Process of elimination. Everyone, grab the person closest to you. If one of you’s got a chute, the other passes theirs on! Come on!”

“He’s right!” one of the clones shout. “Everyone pair up!”

“Screw that!” one of the originals says. “This is an assessment, and there can only be one of us! I say let the other half fall where they may!” And with that, Eggsy watches in horror as one of the black-clad figures suddenly launches himself at one of the others. There's a quick and brutal fight in the air until the original attacker suddenly rips the chute from the other clone's body and shoves him away.

A blood curdling scream tears through the comms, and then it’s all chaos.

The clones are suddenly on each other like rabid animals, eager to rip each other’s packs away. One manages to deploy his chute early enough and take themselves out of the figurative ring, leaving their increasingly desperate cohort behind.

“Oh fuck me!” Eggsy wants no fucking part of this, but before he can deploy what he hopes to be his own chute, he’s abruptly tackled from behind, an arm encircling his throat in a restrictive hold, legs tightly ensnaring themselves around his waist. His controlled fall through the air quickly transforms into a sickening tumble of bodies.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Eggsy shouts, trying to break out of the hold while simultaneously attempting to keep those roving hands from unsnapping him out of his own pack.

“Sorry, Galahad, it’s nothing personal,” says one of the originals, and for some reason, Eggsy just _knows_ it’s Charlie, who’s the worst of the lot. “Look up and do the math.” A quick glance up reveals three chutes dotting the sky above them, shit, but more horrifying are the bodies still falling through the air _without_. “We’re the only ones left, so it’s either you or me, and let’s be honest, your line should have been sunsetted ages ago!”

And Eggsy can feel it before it happens, one moment he’s nestled securely into his pack, and the next, the harness snaps are opened and then the pack is unmoored from his body, helped along by Charlie’s sharp shove.

“Fuck!” It’s pure instinct to twist around and snatch at Charlie’s foot before he’s completely ripped away, holding on for dear life as Charlie tries to shake him off, but with his arms struggling to hold onto Eggsy’s own pack, he can’t do much other than weakly attempt to kick him in the face.

“Get off me, pleb!” Charlie shouts as Eggsy uses his leverage to pull himself back up, avoiding the elbow Charlie tries to send into his helmet while his fingers work to nimbly detach the snaps of Charlie’s own harness. Another nauseating turn, and Eggsy can see the ground is a hell of a lot closer than it had been previously, his vision filled with more green than blue.

He manages to hold on after Charlie’s next attempt to shove him away, and finally breaks the last connection of Charlie’s harness where one wrong shove would send Charlie hurdling out of it.

But instead, Eggsy just wraps himself around Charlie, crossing his legs in tight at the small of Charlie’s back as he slips one arm through the straps of his stolen chute to lock them into a stalemate. “This is what we’re gonna do, you fucker, either we both get out of this alive or we both go down together. Go on! Choose!”

“You’re mad!" Charlie screams back at him.

“At least I’m not homicidal, you fucking dick!”

With a fearful glance to the looming ground below, and shit, Eggsy can see the details of the fucking trees, oh fuck, Charlie growls and pulls the handle of his own chute first and—

—and Eggsy’s body sharply jerks. He nearly loses his grip on Charlie all together as the chute deploys from his pack and blooms in the air above them, dramatically reducing their plummeting descent.

But they’re still falling, too fast, and the white-painted grass rushes up to meet them, and now Eggsy’s shouting and cursing in utter terror, knowing, just _knowing_ , he’s gonna be a smear on that fucking pristine lawn—

The impact, while bone rattling, isn’t fatal.

Eggsy rolls off a gasping Charlie onto his back and stares up at the serene blue sky.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_I’m still afraid of heights. No one knows it or even suspects, not even you, but I am._

_I don’t think it’s the impending death that scares me. I find myself curiously incurious about the spectre of death in all its forms, but I am utterly terrified at the thought of losing control to the inexorable laws of gravity, which are as natural as death itself._

_I know I should be used to it. An agent can’t control for everything in every situation and must learn to pivot accordingly, but within the private confession of these unseen pages? I admit that I hate it. It terrifies me to the point of nightmares._

_Yet somehow with one of the most uncontrollable forces in the universe, Love, I am anything but frightened. On the contrary, there's something about the feeling calms me when nothing else will. I suspect it is because Love is a constantly replenishing resource. Like the stardust we come from and will return to, this thing I have, this thing we share, is constant. Nothing can contain it or destroy it._

_It just is._

_Funny, isn't it? To fear falling but not falling in love._

_Love (ever and ever and ever),_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

“I didn’t have a chute! I didn’t have a _fucking chute_! I was gonna die, Harry! I would’ve been a fucking meat smear on your doorstep if that wanker Charlie hadn’t gotten it into his head to try and take me out!”

Eggsy’s fuming, absolutely fucking _livid_ , and short of hitting someone (preferably fucking Arthur or Merlin, but Charlie would also do in a pinch) or smashing something (Harry’s china tea set was looking more tempting by the second), he paces up and down the length of Harry’s sitting room and rants.

He prefers being angry. It’s better than being terrified out of his fucking mind after seeing three more clone bodies, or rather, their _insides_ , strewn across the lawn. It’s not pretty. From that height, the human body just...breaks apart like shattered glass, except with organs and blood and limbs.

“Eggsy.” Then, Harry’s there, standing directly in front of him to block his next retread, taking hold of his shaking hands. “You didn’t die. You survived. You’re here. When it came down to it, you fought to survive, and that’s all that matters now.”

Unable to keep moving, Eggsy shudders and starts to curl in on himself, losing feeling in his legs. He’d have crumpled to the floor were it not for Harry holding him up, pulling him into his arms instead. This close, Eggsy can smell the light verdant cologne scent Harry wears, can hear his steadily beating heart beneath layers of fine fabric and years of well-honed muscle. “You went through this. How did you do it? How did you survive?”

Harry remains quiet as Eggsy lets himself be soothed by the steady rhythm of his pulse and the warmth emanating from his body. But the longer Harry goes without speaking, the more dread starts curdling in his stomach until Eggsy finally hears: “I didn’t have a chute.”

Eggsy forgets to breathe.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Harry whispers, his voice thin and brittle.

He tries to imagine a younger Harry Hart tumbling through the air, frantically yanking on his pack’s deploy handle only to discover the betrayal. Except, Harry Hart hadn’t been Harry Hart back then. He’d have been some military phonetic alphabet designation. He hadn’t earned the name Galahad yet nor the right to choose his own name after, and he would have been so desperate to have done, especially seeing what happened to those who failed.

The thought of staying on these grounds for another bloody minute has him wanting to crawl out of his skin.

“Come on,” he declares, finding the strength to stand on his own two feet and even pulling Harry down the hall.

“What are you doing?” Harry asks with bewilderment, though it’s a testament to how much trust he places in Eggsy when he doesn’t actively resist Eggsy’s tugs on his hand.

“Leaving.”

“Leaving? To go where?”

“Dunno. Anywhere. Just not here.” And he has his heart set on that beautiful little Jaguar sitting in Kingsman’s garage right now.

“We don’t have a mission,” Harry argues.

“So?” Eggsy turns and rounds on him, causing Harry to abruptly stop. “Aren’t agents allowed to leave the premises? Or at least there’s no rules saying they can’t. I’m an agent. You’re pretty much still an agent. We can come and go as we please.”

“I’ve...I’ve never left the estate for any other purpose.”

“What? Not ever? Not even with Galahad?”

“It never really occurred to us that we could do so,” Harry admits, and from the way he is slightly hunched in on himself, Eggsy realises Harry’s embarrassed.

It’s a look that he should never have again, Eggsy decides.

“Come on then, I think you’re gonna like this,” he coaxes, trying to imbue some of JB’s irresistible pleading into his own eyes, and this time, Harry lets himself be led to the garage.

Once he’s behind the wheel and going too fast down the narrow rural roads, Eggsy can feel himself relaxing. There’s hilly countryside on either side of him that is occasionally dotted with a horse or cow or sheep and the sky overhead is marbled grey. The top’s down and the wind rushes through his hair. It smells a bit like manure, but he doesn’t care. It’s bloody marvelous.

Harry sits demurely in the passenger seat, not even so much as jolting when Eggsy takes another sharp turn with too much speed. His gaze stays transfixed to the rolling terrain like he’s seeing it for the very first time, and in a way, maybe he is. There’s a rebellious curl of hair that has escaped its styling and franticly flaps in the air, and it makes Eggsy want to reach out and smooth it back down.

By the time they pull into a quaint little village whose name Eggsy doesn’t know, the sun is starting to set and the sky is painted in brilliant reds, pinks, and oranges. There’s a nice little coffee shop with what looks like gelato offerings that appears especially cosy, and it’s here that Eggsy drags Harry to first when he learns that Harry’s never had fucking ice cream before.

“I know what gelato is,” Harry says with a note of exasperation. “But we only ever consume food as a source of fuel and during the missions it was always more of a prop than something deserving of this much vocal...enthusiasm.”

“It’s fucking criminal, is what it is,” Eggsy declares and proceeds to order a small cup of _everything_ available, relishing the thought of that charge showing up on Kingsman’s accounts later.

And, alright, he’ll admit he might have overdone it as he stares at their little table now covered in cups of gelato, some threatening to wobble off the sides, but this is important, he reasons. Over the sea of cups across from him, Harry looks positively gobsmacked, which is a private delight all on its own.

“Eggsy, has the stress gotten to you?” he asks seriously. “You’re exhibiting some alarming mental symptoms that I’m not sure aren’t—”

“I’m mentally fit as fuck, thanks very much.” Eggsy scowls. “But you know, real people, they’ve got preferences for shit, so I think it’s high time we start finding out some of yours, and ice cream is as good as any place to start. Go on and choose one.”

As Harry stares at him and Eggsy just stares at him right back in challenge, and finally it’s Harry who looks away first. Or more specifically, down at his array of offerings. He takes forever in studying each one, and Eggsy can practically see him weighing the perceived pros and cons.

“If you don’t hurry it up a bit, you’ll be drinking them like shots instead,” Eggsy says as a helpful PSA.

Finally Harry tentatively selects the chocolate gelato. Well, what Eggsy thinks is the chocolate one at any rate. “Excellent choice,” he praises nonetheless because it’s the one he’d have gone for first.

The look on Harry’s face when he puts a dainty bite of gelato in his mouth is...depressing. A grimace briefly flickers across his lips before they are once more set in a neutral line. Eggsy winces. “No? That bad?” Who the fuck doesn’t like ice cream?

“It’s...cold chocolate,” Harry says simply, setting the cup back down.

But Eggsy is determined, because even though Harry’s a freak who may not like chocolate, there’s got to be something that he does like, because to not like any ice cream _ever_ is just not on. He picks up the cheerfully coloured limoncello and practically shoves it in Harry’s face. “Try this one.”

Harry is, understandably, hesitant, but if anything he humours Eggsy by taking a dutiful bite. Eggsy holds his breath, and this time he’s not disappointed. While Harry may be quick to express his distaste, pleasure is slower to arrive and subtle enough to be easily missed, but Eggsy sees it. There’s a brighter shine to Harry’s eyes as he’s caught off guard by something pleasant for once. The corners of his mouth turn up ever so slightly. He almost seems guilty because he enjoys something so much.

“You like it,” Eggsy says, grinning. He feels absurdly happier than if he had had the ice cream for himself. “See? It’s good, innit?”

“It’s more appealing than the chocolate,” Harry allows.

“There! See? That’s a preference right there. You can decide what you want and don’t want when given the chance. It’s no different than what anyone else does, Harry.”

“I fail to see what gelato has to do with what we are and what we are made for, Eggsy,” Harry sighs, setting his cup down. “We’re still Kingsman property. We aren’t even legal entities in the eyes of the British government. Well, _I’m_ not, I should say. To consider myself as anything more than a tool for my organisation to use as it sees fit is a foolhardy endeavour. You of all people should know what happens to those who stray.”

“I’ve also seen what happens to those who follow marching orders to the letter,” Eggsy shoots back with. “It don’t seem much better. At least my dad believed in and fought for something. I’m grateful. He gave me a better life than what I would have had growing up here. He gave me a life, full stop.”

Harry stiffens and narrows his eyes. “You may look down upon Kingsman and your fellow clones that you see as being sheltered and naive, Eggsy, but I’m proud of the life I’ve had and the work I’ve done. I’ve saved thousands lives and actively prevented an untold number of catastrophes that no one will ever know about. If I died today, I would be very satisfied with the impact my life has made on this world. Can you say the same for yours?”

It’s a low blow and Eggsy certainly feels the sting of it. Hi jaw clenches as he tries to not give in to his first impulse, which is to launch a verbal offencive right back, and instead closes his eyes and strives for calm. “I’m sorry. I’m not...that’s not what I meant at all. I just watched three people die today in a truly awful way and no one seems to care. They lived and died as non-entities who never even got to experience anything beyond Kingsman’s walls and no one to miss them. That isn’t right. You can’t bring a human into this world and simply not treat them like one. They still think and feel like a human does because they bloody well are. I just...I just want more for you than that, Harry.”

Harry remains silent once more, gaze fixed upon the melting gelato cups between them. Finally, he reaches out and selects one, something light pink coloured, and takes a spoonful. A pause, and then: “Well, this one tastes like absolute dog shit.”

Eggsy blinks and then huffs out a laugh. “That one was either, uh, strawberry or candy floss, I think.”

“It certainly wasn’t the strawberry.”

“I’ll add that to your lists of dislikes,” Eggsy says with a small smile. “We’re making progress yet.”

“Perhaps progress on my ever expanding waistline if we keep this up.”

Eggsy casts a once over Harry’s lithe striking figure in his slim cut suit and picks a cup at random, shoving a bite of its contents into his mouth to wet his throat. Orange cream, which isn’t his favourite. “You’re still pretty fucking fit, mate. ‘Sides, I thought you was supposed to be retired. Don’t that mean you’re allowed to take it easy now?”

“I'm in transition,” Harry corrects, and for whatever complaints he may have had about the impending stone he is supposedly going to gain, he still tries the pistachio, which is also a hit, “When you’re deemed fully ready to operate on your own as an agent without any further guidance on my part, I will retire in full.”

“So what’s that mean then? You get time off to paint and what not? Or do they just make you wash the floors instead?”

“For a life of full service to Kingsman, we receive a generous retirement package, including the _choice_ of where we’d like to spend our golden days,” Harry says pointedly. “I’m thinking Santorini would be nice.”

Eggsy has no idea where that is, but it’s probably very warm and very beautiful and he likes the idea of Harry having nothing to do other than get a nice glowy tan on the beach because if anyone deserves that happy ending, it ought to be him. “So you’re just biding your time now until you can finally start living the good life, hey? Sorry for pushing that date back a bit.”

“You’re hardly to blame, Eggsy. If not for you, it would have been many more years still until a third generation would be viable for agent status. Possibly never.”

“Which makes me wonder why they’re even retiring you now, seeing as how you can be a scary fuck when you want.” He still keenly remembers Harry’s grip on his throat.

“There’s no fighting the aging process, I’m afraid. Even I can’t argue that my reflexes, strength, and resilience are what they once were at the prime of my life.”

“You must have been unstoppable then,” Eggsy muses.

Harry smirks and leans forward. “And you have the capacity within you to be even better.” He reaches out to take a sample of the orange cream Eggsy holds in his hand. Eggsy watches the spoon slowly emerge from between Harry’s lips and his throat bob as he pauses to contemplate the flavour. Another win. 

Eggsy swallows. “You may think my design is supposed to be better, but I’d be lucky to be half as good as you, you know.”

“Something tells me you will be,” Harry says with so much conviction, Eggsy’s nearly inclined to believe him.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, it's been awhile! Hullo :)

_But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned._

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_You always caution me to stay in the moment, focus on my immediate surroundings, to use my senses and not my assumptions, but when not in immediate danger, I can’t help but let my mind wander away from me._

_I know how much you hate when I do it, you say it never leads to anything good, but our world is often a small one, isn’t it? I’ve had to let my mind grow large just to breathe._

_So I don’t think much about the very present. I think too much about the future. Where we will be five or ten years down the line, provided either of us lives that long. You complain about aching joints and early bedtimes, make checklists of new hobbies you want to pick up, quote silly geographic facts at me about Fiji or New Zealand or Bali. I keep trying to imagine you fishing out in the middle of some azure blue ocean, vainly attempting to keep your lunch away from the monkeys, wearing terrible cargo shorts and a hideous floral top, skin sunburned and then tanned into leather, those curls you are always trying to tame hopelessly mangled by the briny air._

_Don’t you see? You keep me in the future all the time. I find myself already wanting to be there with you._

_Maybe they will develop the third generation soon and I will be freed of my responsibilities once my successor is all trained up. Maybe I can retire early and join you one day. We’ll play cards and drink straight from the bottle, always, and the only news of the outside world we’ll ever hear is what we watch in the little local bar we love to go to. And we’ll only give it a cursory glance, not really paying attention, because it won’t be our problem and we won’t care._

_When you bark at me sharply for wool gathering again, Harry, this is what I’m thinking about. I’m not even sorry anymore._

_Regards,_

_Galahad_

 

_____

 

“Your eyes are the most amazing shade of blue. Are you wearing contacts?” Eggsy hears Charlie say as his opening line to one Lady Sophie Montague-Herring.

“No!” Sophie exclaims somewhere in the range of exasperation.

“You are! Don’t lie!”

“I’m not!”

Eggsy doesn’t know whether to sneer at this disaster in the making he gets to personally witness or to simply feel pity. As he’s still _fuming_ at Charlie for nearly killing him, he happily revels in the former.

For once, there’s an assessment that doesn’t end in gruesome death, and maybe it’s sad that Eggsy is immensely grateful for this pittance of mercy, but gift horses and all. Of course, as he’s made to witness each sheltered Kay clone’s less than graceful attempts to seduce an unsuspecting young woman each night at some posh Soho nightclub full of twats, he doesn’t know if the near constant secondhand embarrassment is all that much preferable.

They’re supposed to take turns employing their NLP training, one per night, as four identical men showing up all together at once would be rather unsettling. The thing is, for all the Kay clones had been raised with superior survival and combat skills, genetic defects aside, they are absolutely rubbish at interacting with real human beings out in the so-called wild. Understandably so, given that it actually _is_ their first time out in the real world. Leave it to bloody Kingsman to throw one out in the deep end on their first try.

“Negging,” Lancelot says next to him, causing Eggsy to startle. She crept up beside him so quietly, he hadn’t even noticed her arrival before the wall of monitors that display Charlie’s assessment in glorious high definition. “Undermining a woman’s confidence to make her more open to his advances and to instill a desire to win his approval.”

“What a cock,” Eggsy mutters, wondering if the asshole gene really was genetic after all.

“Basic neuro linguistic programming,” she scoffs with disdain. “He’ll need to work on that.”

“They make you do this too?” Eggsy asks, curiosity finally overcoming his resentment and squirming discomfort.

“Yes, though I dare say it was much easier for me. We had to seduce a heterosexual male. In fact, it worked against us to actually _say_ anything clever.”

Eggsy tries to picture it and...yeah, he can see that, actually. A beautiful women practically throwing herself at one’s feet wasn’t a temptation many would pass up on nor question. Eggsy hesitates, then asks more quietly. “And Harry?”

Lancelot turns her attention to him, and Eggsy tries not to fidget for the way she seems to miss nothing, seeing straight through him. There’s something different about her, a gleam of too much knowledge in her eyes, far too much perception. He wonders what she really thinks of her employers, of the whole situation, but hasn’t quite worked up the courage to dare ask. “Of course. Though I believe his was somewhat more challenging. He had to seduce a heterosexual man as well.”

Eggsy blinks and almost does a doubletake. “You’re fucking with me.”

“It’s in his records if you don’t believe me,” Lancelot says. 

“I...did he succeed?” Eggsy asks.

“I believe he did.” Lancelot smirks at the strangled sound Eggsy makes in his throat. “Galahad has always been far more empathetic than many of the other models. Harry especially. He was always very good with people. Employed on several deep cover missions in his prime. The Gen Two….” But Lancelot trails off, frowning. “Well.”

There’s something there, Eggsy senses, and he leaps upon it without thinking it through. “Were you friends with him?”

“We were introduced together. The first of the newest generations. Our handlers treated us like prize-winning horses. The first generation resented us. Maybe they could see the writing on the wall,” Lancelot says softly, keeping her gaze firmly trained on the monitors. “We could confide in each other. Things I would never admit to James and Galahad wouldn’t even tell Harry….if that’s what being friends means, then...yes. Yes, I like to think so. My only one, perhaps.”

“I’m sorry,” Eggsy says.

Whatever far off place Lancelot had gone, she seems to return to herself now, spine straightening, blinking away the glazed look of internal reminiscence, guardedness drawn back up over her features. She turns to look at Eggsy. “James was my forebear as Harry was Galahad’s, but James and I never really had the closeness Galahad and Harry had. Something must have happened. Galahad would never have, not without good….” Again, another catch. Her lips press together as she swallows down more words.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I just think you should be careful,” Lancelot finally says. “You seem like a very kind person, Eggsy. I wish you had never found out about any of this.”

Eggsy tries to smile, like it’s all a joke. “Harry said the same thing.”

Lancelot mirrors his smile, though there’s something inexplicably more sad about it, before taking her leave, no doubt to tell Merlin he ought to end Charlie’s misery before he can make a bigger fool of himself.

Left to mull over everything that had transpired in the last two minutes, Eggsy can’t help but let the anxieties that were always there rise to the foremost of his thoughts again. Lancelot is eminently careful in everything she says and does, so very much the opposite of James, Eggsy can see. She seems very much aware of the precariousness of their lives. She knows more than she says. It makes her regret and her warnings that much more terrifying, in all honesty.

He stews so deeply, going round and round, in these thoughts, he doesn’t even notice Merlin’s presence at his side until the man speaks, causing him to startle.

Merlin gives him a deeply disapproving look, causing Eggsy to flush. “I hope you’ll be ready for tomorrow.”

“Ready for what?”

“Your assessment.” Merlin nods to the screens.

Eggsy almost scoffs, wondering if Merlin’s taking the piss, but he’s got the best poker face in the biz. “You want me to take the NLP assessment.” Merlin’s face doesn’t change. “I know how to pull.”

“Then you should score high marks all around,” Merlin says.

“Seriously?”

“Mmm.”

“Fine,” Eggsy says, giving Merlin a big smirk to cover his annoyance at the whole affair. “It’s easy. Posh girls love a bit of rough anyway.”

 

_____

 

He could have dressed up nice, wearing one of the many tailored suits at his disposal, adorning himself in expensive watches, cologne, and the like, but that, Eggsy felt, would have been overkill given he was set to absolutely smash the competition as it was against those poor sods.

Besides, he missed his old clothes. He even missed, dare he say it, some aspects of his old life: the not constantly being watched, for one, nor being surrounded by cutthroats, for another.

Thus, when he walks into the club the next evening, Jeremy Scott Adidas jacket, winged trainers, and white snapback egregiously on full display, he feels defiantly confident. He knows on the other end of the cameras, Merlin is wincing and the Kay clones are sneering, but let them. He’s got skills one can’t grow in a lab.

Why is it, Eggsy thinks as he plucks one of the complimentary flutes of champagne from a tray, the more money posh folks had, the more things they got for free? Or that being poor cost so fucking much?

He makes a slow scan of the room as he sips on some surprisingly rank champagne, considering and dismissing each one as they come under his study—posh prick, wanker, wanker, poor sod thinks he’s made it with that one but he really hasn’t got a chance and never will, wanker—until he spots his selected target, one Arabella Crawford, blessedly sans any hyphenated surnames. She’s pretty with light brown hair and big brown eyes that actually seem warm rather than forbidding. Her attire is fairly conservative for her surroundings, a full on black jumpsuit with a high collar, slim fitting, but not overly so.

She’s also, as Eggsy observes her subtly and longingly check out one of her girlfriends who had accompanied her to the club, probably more into women then men. 

“Fucking Merlin,” Eggsy mutters. There were challenges and then there was being set up to fail. While Harry Hart, charming bastard that he is, could do just fine in seducing any seemingly heterosexual bloke, Eggsy knows better than to think he’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of persuading a disinterested woman for the same.

Realising he’s pretty much fucked (just not in the manner the assessment requires), he drains his glass and practically drapes himself off one of the nearby railings. If this were a real mission, he thinks, sleeping with someone didn’t always have to be an imperative, surely, else Kingsman would have done its due diligence and found someone more suitable to the task. The point of this whole thing ought to be seeing if one could gain a target’s trust, right? He could, at the very least, befriend Arabella, fail just a little bit less, and at least register his protests later that the whole assessment was a load of bollocks from the start.

Mind made up, Eggsy pushes off from the railing, which appears to be a mistake because the world lurches around him sickeningly, causing him to drop his empty glass (vaguely registering the distant shattering noise of it) before staggering and catching himself against the wall. It doesn’t help all that much, but at least it gives him a stationary point of reference. His stomach feels...not great The music begins to warp in his ears, the world tunnelling.

“What the fuck?” he says, but all that comes out is a jumbled slur.

“Did you know there’s one sure way you could have taken her home?” Eggsy looks up and barely makes out the features of the same pale man with thinning hair who had been holding the tray of drinks from earlier, large, watery eyes gleaming, a strange smile etched into his wide mouth. “Rohypnol.”

The last thing Eggsy thinks before his world is plunged into darkness is he’s a bigger mug than the Kay clones after all.

 

_____

 

And the first thing Eggsy mumbles when he regains consciousness is, “...the fuck?”

Coming to is, needless to say, unpleasant. Like having the worst bloody hangover of his life. His mouth is dry, he feels hot and sweaty, feverish. His stomach rolls and floods his mouth with the sour taste of bile. Eggsy jerks his head and it feels like it’s been weighted down with several rocks. He tries to roll over onto his side, remembering something about not choking on one’s own sick in case he did lose the battle with his stomach, and that’s how he discovers his hands and feet are expertly tied down. What the fuck.

When he slowly blinks and looks up, there’s a tall man in a dark coat looming above him, vaguely familiar, but mostly fucking alarming. “Who the fuck are you?”

“This knife, Eggsy,” the man says, holding up said implement for Eggsy to see, “Could save your life.”

Don’t seem fucking likely from his point of view, Eggsy wants to say, but then the not-so-distant bright shine of headlights catches his attention, and he feels it, the light vibrations in the ground beneath him, the low rumble of an oncoming train, and yeah, yeah he gets it now.

“Fuck!” At least the panic serves to clear a lot of the remaining fog in his head and cut right through the nausea as he frantically struggles in his bindings. “Fuck, get me out of here!”

“You just have to tell me one thing,” the man shouts over the swiftly growing sounds of the approaching train and the high-pitched screech of metal as the wheels roll over the line. “What is Kingsman and who the fuck is Harry Hart?”

Oh, _fuck_. At first, Eggsy thinks he’s been taken by Valentine again, but Valentine knew all about Kingsman in the first place. Maybe a rival agency? MI5? He’s seen enough _24_ to know that torture and death threats probably aren’t above any government agency these days. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t know who that is!”

“I’m afraid that’s not good enough,” the man says, tutting him like Eggsy’s gone and spilt something on his rug. 

“Just untie me, please!”

“Then give me an answer!” The man shouts back at him. “Come on, Eggsy. Is Kingsman really worth dying for?”

The glare from the train’s headlights are making it difficult to even see the man, the train’s engine nearly drowning out the end of his question. Eggsy realises with sudden clarity that he’s about to die.

It isn’t worth it, not for Kingsman, he knows.

But for Harry? Yes. Yes, absolutely.

“Fuck you!” he shouts, because they are as good as any last words he could have before departing this whole fucked up world and fucked up life. And as the train bears down upon him, Eggsy flinches and squeezes his eyes shut, bracing himself for the moment of impact, stomach feeling like it’s dropping out from beneath him—

—and doesn’t fully stop doing so until he realises it’s quieting down as the train continues on its way down the line and it’s only his heart that’s pounding loudly in his ears now.

Eggsy opens his eyes, one at a tentative time.

Harry stands above him. There’s a thoughtful expression on his face, and something in his eyes as well. Warmth. Pride. The corners of his mouth are slightly turned up. “Bloody well done.”

“Seriously?!” Slowly, Eggsy unclenches the rest of his body as his heart starts to calm and wits finally catch up with him. Another fucking fucked up test. Of course. He’s partly grateful he hadn’t fucking pissed himself. “What’s with the fucking bait and switch?”

“Kingsman doesn’t usually have to question their subjects’ loyalty, but you were still an unknown quantity,” Harry explains. “They had to know.”

Eggsy’s trying not to be angry, but it’s really fucking hard. He supposes being roofied, kidnapped, and threatened with a grisly death would do that. With great restraint, he tries to keep his tone level. “And if I had talked?”

Harry’s expression turns stony. “Then they would have allowed the train take care of the problem.”

 

_____

 

“You’re peaky,” Harry says to him on the taxi back to Kingsman.

“No shit,” Eggsy grinds out, trying not shiver. The air feels like it’s dropped ten degrees.

Harry must feel it anyway because he asks the driver to turn on the heat and, more to Eggsy’s surprise, shrugs off his coat with only a small degree of awkwardness in the confines of the back seat and blankets it over Eggsy. It’s thick and warm and smells like Harry. Eggsy stills and sighs.

“Thanks,” he says, trying not to look like a rodent burrowing into it, but he still can’t help rubbing his cheek against the coarse wool.

“It’s often times like these after a particularly difficult mission when there’s only one thing I look forward to,” Harry says.

“What’s that then?”

“A good, stiff drink.”

“Thought you said I couldn’t during assessments.”

Harry turns back to him. His face is mostly swathed in shadow, but Eggsy feels like he’d know the look in his eyes anywhere: sly, slightly cheeky, conspiratorial. “Maybe just this once, we can make an exception.” 

Turns out, Harry doesn’t just have one bottle of gin—he has _seven_ , and many of them were names Eggsy had never heard of. Eggsy had thought any old bottle of Tanqueray was class, but no.

"No. _Ten_ is serviceable under dire circumstances, I suppose." There is even a semi-disdainful sniff, which makes Eggsy laugh under his breath. Harry was as far from a snob as a posh bloke could be, but he was certainly... _discerning_ when it came to the things he took seriously.

And the things Harry took seriously were libations. In his rooms at Kingsman, Harry had a separate cooler reserved for them, replete with all manner of chilled glasses. And don't get Eggsy wrong: if a significant part of being a Kingsman agent/gentleman spy meant imbibing in only the very best booze, well, that was something he could take to quite easily.

"Keep stirring," Harry says, peering over his shoulder into the metal shaker that currently contains Martini Attempt Number Five.

To be fair, Eggsy had really nailed it by Three after a few initial mistakes.

("Only a cap full of vermouth and nothing more. None of this equal parts nonsense."

and

"No, Eggsy, don't shake it. You'll bruise the gin. Bond has that one completely wrong.")

Four had been thinly excused as needing to cement his mixing mastery. Five, however, is starting to get a bit sloppy, but by now, they were both more than a bit tipsy to care.

"That's where many a martini has gone awry. Impatience will result in a sub-par temperature and taste."

Well, maybe they still cared a little.

Eggsy could feel the warm, long press of Harry against his back, a stark contrast to the cold metal beneath his fingers, which was, in turn, a stark contrast to the sudden heat kissing his cheeks. He didn't dare look up until Harry moved away again.

Harry had lost his tie and jacket the moment they had returned to his rooms. Then later, his braces, holster, and finally the top few buttons of his shirt. Now, though, Harry had unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves to the middle of his forearms, revealing the strong, elegant lines of his wrists. His usual perfect posture had, while still well within the acceptable bounds of proper, relaxed and opened. He looked both rakish and sophisticated at once.

When Eggsy offers Harry his drink, his less than steady hand resulting in a bit of overspill, Harry only waves off his apology and brings his wrist to his mouth, licking away the remnants with a casual throwaway grace that has Eggsy swallowing around a suddenly dry throat.

"Ah, this one. This one, Eggsy, is your most beautiful one yet," Harry declares with a proud smile that was alcohol-loosened at the edges. "I think you've well got it."

Eggsy has never been filled with so much warmth and happiness as in that moment, perhaps because it’s sharply contrasted with the terror of how the evening had started. The way Harry looks at him, the way his eyes don’t shy away from fondness in the soft incandescent lighting. It isn’t just the perfect martini. It’s how far Eggsy has come to be here, all the obstacles and challenges he’s had to overcome, how many times he had finally proven himself capable.

And isn’t that just a little fucked up. It’s a grim thought that sharply sours his mood. “Is this all I have to look forward to?” Eggsy asks after taking a too large mouthful of what was essentially gin. “Nearly dying, returning to HQ, drinking the stress away while waiting to be sent back out again?” Not that the prospect seemed all that bad like this with Harry here with him. 

“Galahad had once asked the very same question,” Harry tells him. Buffered by enough booze, he doesn’t even sound very horribly sad anymore. “I hadn’t really even thought about it before then, but he...always questioned everything. You are...you do and say things that are similar.”

It’s not quite a _you remind me of him_ , but Eggsy hears it. “I’m sorry he’s not here and I am,” Eggsy says. Perhaps things would have been better for both of them then.

“I miss him,” Harry admits. No tempering it, no justifications this time, no platitudes or prevarications. “But you’ve made this time a little brighter still, Eggsy.” And, Eggsy sees, he means it too. It’s the way Harry smiles just a little bit, and the way gin stretches it wider anyway. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Eggsy goes easily enough when Harry leads them away from his rooms through the big, dark, empty halls of the mansion’s living quarters.

“We alright to traipse about in the dark like this?” Eggsy jokes, trailing after Harry in an admittedly loose, meandering manner.

“They’re all in bed,” Harry says over his shoulder, giving Eggsy a smirk. “So when the cat’s away….”

“What do you get up to so late at night, Harry Hart?”

“A little midnight stroll,” Harry answers mysteriously before slowing to a halt before a handsome set of old wooden doors. “I almost always end up here. It’s my favourite room.”

He pushes the doors open with his usual showmanship to reveal a vast library with high ceilings and towering bookshelves to match, the kind that requires tall rolling ladders to reach the highest shelves. There are hardbound books as far as the eye can see and leather chairs by the fireplace, the windows, set in small alcoves, or paired together for intimate conversation. There’s an old chess set on a table that still captures the positions of some unfinished game and, of course, the massive portraits on the walls depicting a bunch of stern looking old men. Eggsy would wager good money they were Kingsman’s founders.

It smells like leather and paper and peace. Just the sort of place Eggsy could see Harry quietly spending a night within, sitting before a merrily blazing fire, sipping good brandy, casually reading some book of poetry or philosophic tome.

It’s a bit intimidating, and Eggsy hovers in the doorway until Harry boldly strides in like he owns the room. Eggsy suspects he’s one of its few visitors, and certainly its most frequent. Harry unerringly makes his way to one of the far right shelves, beckoning Eggsy closer to find Harry holding a worn book in his hands that’s clearly seen frequent use.

Eggsy has to lean in over Harry’s shoulder and squint, eventually using the moonlight streaming in through the tall, narrow windows to glimpse the title. _The Once and Future King_.

“This is my favourite story,” Harry says quietly like they’re in an actual library and have got to whisper. He turns his face just a little to meet Eggsy’s eyes. “I’ve read this countless times. He used to ask if I ever got sick of it, but I never did. I used to read it aloud to him. _He_ probably got sick of it, but he never once asked me to stop.”

“Never read it,” Eggsy admits, finding it very easy to simply rest his tired head on Harry’s shoulder right there and then, and Harry doesn’t even pull away or shrug him off when he does. “It’s about King Arthur, innit? You sure like to stick to a theme.”

“It’s about the nature of power and responsibility. It’s about what makes us human,” Harry says. “Cultural myths are powerful because they resonate with the most essential human emotions. Shared stories tell us about ourselves.”

“How can you read this and have these thoughts and say such things,” Eggsy asks, “And still not think you’re as human as any of them? That you don’t matter like they do?”

“Because I hadn’t known what any of it really meant, not for the longest time, Eggsy, not until….”

 _Him_ , Eggsy finishes, as he lightly coaxes Harry fully towards him and does something remarkably stupid.

He leans in, and then after that, it’s inertia that keeps him going through with it, tipping his face up, meeting Harry’s lips with his own.

At first, Harry doesn’t respond, and Eggsy thinks he’s gone and fucked it all up in spectacular fashion as usual, but then Harry’s pressing back, opening his mouth to Eggsy’s questing tongue, tasting of juniper, letting Eggsy circle his shoulders with an arm and grab a fistful of his hair. He’s wrapping his own arms around Eggsy’s waist to pull him closer, to sink into, and distantly, Eggsy hears the flutter of pages as the book falls from Harry’s lax fingers.

It’s surprisingly loud, the book thumping against the floor, and the sound it makes upon impact is _off_. The disruption is just wrong and loud enough to jolt them out of the madness that had overtaken them, yanking them apart, causing them to both look at the source of the noise with swollen lips and the blood pumping in their ears.

But it’s not simply a book anymore that’s splayed out over the floor. Something’s happened with the binding, the pages.

Harry pulls away and gathers them all up, and Eggsy can see that it isn’t the pages of the book scattered about, but papers that had been _wedged_ into the book’s binding, loosened and set free.

Slowly, Harry unfolds one and all Eggsy needs to see is the _Dear Harry_ in an elegant black-inked script to know who wrote them.

Letters, every single paper is a letter to Harry, hidden away until such a time as this.

Harry sinks to his knees. The look on his face is as fragile as the papers he holds, devastating.

It’s like someone’s gone and thrown a bucket of cold water over Eggsy, quickly sobering him up, chilling him to the bone and leaving him feeling vaguely ill. He’s just tried to get with a grieving man. It’s the lowest thing he’s ever done. “Harry, I’m so….”

“Please just go,” Harry manages to say, not even able to tear his gaze from the papers he cradles in his hands like they are delicate and precious, because they are. And when Eggsy doesn’t move, he shouts, “GO!”

It makes Eggsy jump, and once he’s been startled into motion, he keeps running, out of the library, through the big, empty halls of Kingsman, back to the dormitory where the other Kay clones (are there even less of them now?) continue to sleep, ever ignorant to the currents swirling around them.

 

_____

 

_Dearest,_

_I am still thinking about it. My heart races every time I recall the ghost of your hand on my hip. The drag of your fingers down my spine. How you paused at the pulse point in my neck, nuzzling and licking and then just listening. I called you a vampire at the time but secretly, Harry, secretly I loved it._

_I loved all of it._

_How clumsy we were for two experienced spies, well-versed in the art of seduction but complete novices in making love. It didn’t matter. No mentor nor student here, just us trying to find our way together and it was all wonderful, every discovery and mistake. I love learning new things about you. How ticklish you are. How obsessed you are with tasting every inch of me like you’ve got to catalogue every sensory detail. How you kiss like a brute, all consuming, all demanding, until I think I will simply disappear inside you. I would not mind, Harry._

_Maybe you were right to be cautious. To try and stop this at first. You feel like a drug. Once isn’t enough Harry. I want you every night, every day, every time I see you. I look at you and I think about it. I think about it and I want to look at you. I’ve touched myself too many times to count today because of you._

_I’m not sure how I will continue behaving normally when I can’t look you in the eye. When every cell in my body wants you all the time._

_My mind isn’t on the work anymore. My heart beats with one repeating question._

_When? When? When?_

_\- G_

 

_____

 

Roofies and several strong martinis do not a good morning make, which Eggsy now knows firsthand. His head aches something fierce. His mouth is just rank. His stomach turns over at the thought of food. His heart hurts.

He avoids looking at the three Kay clones who are left, the ABCs who stand around together and smirk at each other while sneering at him, because there _are_ less of them, another one having been culled by the last assessment, no doubt by some determining factor Eggsy has yet to divine. He wants to care, wants to be horrified all over again, but maybe it’s a new kind of horror, _not_ feeling horrified by any of it anymore. Just weary.

At breakfast, he sits alone in the cafeteria like some terrible teenage film cliche but now he doesn’t even notice. He’s still seeing Harry’s face, free of its usual restrained mask, emotions playing out nakedly across his features, red-rimmed shining eyes, everything else so still, like he’s been petrified.

Worse still, his lips remember the heat and pressure of Harry’s mouth. The way he came alive, clung to Eggsy, desperately kissed back. Had it continued, had it been allowed to run its course—

He’s broken from his thoughts by a crumpled up napkin bouncing off his skull.

Eggsy shoots a glare in the other clones’ direction. “What the fuck, are you fucking twelve?” He can’t even bear to wait for their bullshit response, just gathers up his uneaten meal and throws it in the bin before storming out of the room.

He’s got to find Harry. He’s got to apologise again. He’s got see if Harry’s okay, he’s got to—

In his sheer determination, Eggsy nearly runs smack into the very man he’s sought out, saved only by Harry’s quick reflexes again, reaching out to grip Eggsy by his shoulders to stop his forward momentum and stop him in his tracks.

Harry looks...well, terrible. His eyes are bloodshot and swollen behind his glasses. He’s terribly wan and clearly exhausted, somehow diminished in both spirit and body, but his gaze, when it meets Eggsy’s, is glittering and hard.

“Harry, I was just looking for you. I...are you alright?” Eggsy asks, more concerned than anything now.

He’s even more alarmed when Harry just raises a finger to his lip and curtly shakes his head before something behind Eggsy catches his attention and he physically drags Eggsy to a nearby empty room that, at first glance, appears to be an office of some sort.

“What are you—” Eggsy starts, but then he shuts up when he hears the voices. Familiar ones.

“Can you believed I used to work here every day?” Valentine asks. “All these stuffy rooms and uncomfortable chairs. But they keep them, because it’s _tradition_ , not because it’s actually useful, you know?”

“Isn’t that representative of the entire Kingsman’s organisation?” another heavily accented female voice asks, and Eggsy has to push at Harry just a little to peer through the crack he’s left in the door to confirm it’s that woman with the deadly blades. Gazelle.

Just a few paces behind the pair trail Arthur and Merlin, neither one looking particularly happy.

“Well, don’t let us keep you then,” Merlin says. “I’m sure you have many more pressing, visionary matters to attend to.”

Valentine chuckles as he stops and turns around to face Merlin. “I’ve really missed you, M. You’re still the only forward thinking one in this whole joint. When you get tired of working for the aristocracy, there’s a place for you in my company. It’s a real sweet setup. All of the toys, none of the red tape. I’ll even let you keep the codename.”

“Tempting,” Merlin says dryly. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”

“It’s an open offer, man. Think about it.” Valentine shrugs before focusing on Arthur. His smile turns more sneering. “Yours, however, isn’t. I’m only making it once.”

Arthur narrows his eyes, drawing himself up into his most haughty, posh wanker self. “Kingsman has no interest in your proposal, Mr Valentine. Let’s say it lacks a certain sort of...elegance, but considering the one who proposed it, I’d expect nothing less.”

“Still haven’t changed at all, Arthur. Certainly not with the times. Be careful, they may just leave you behind,” Valentine says before his serious tone veers back into cheerful inanity once more. “We’ll see ourselves out, gentlemen. I doubt the exits have changed either, right?”

“By all means, suit yourself,” Merlin says before tapping his own glasses, “I’ll even keep watch to make sure you don’t go awry.”

Harry drags Eggsy away from the door as Valentine and Gazelle move past their room, and they both don’t so much as breathe until the hallway is empty again.

“What are Valentine and Gazelle doing at Kingsman?” Eggsy hisses. “Why ain’t Arthur like, I dunno, detaining them? Interrogating them?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says. “They met in Arthur’s office alone for some time this morning, and then Merlin as was asked to escort them out. I’m going to follow them.”

“Harry, wait! Harry!” Eggsy says, but it’s already too late as Harry quickly slips out the door. “Fuck!”

He wavers between remaining where he is and wanting to follow, not wanting to get anywhere near Gazelle’s blades again, but the thought of Harry doing it in his place is nigh on unbearable. 

Gritting his teeth, Eggsy leaves the room and goes after him. It's harder than it looks. Harry’s quick and quiet when he wants to be, and by the time Eggsy catches up, it’s already too late: the three of them squared off in confrontation right in the main foyer.

“Well look who it is again,” Valentine says when Eggsy practically stumbles into the room. “Galahad Jr, Kingsman’s latest and greatest.”

Harry gives him a sharp look. “Go back to your dormitory, Eggsy.”

“Like hell I will,” Eggsy shoots back, ignoring the way Harry glares daggers at him. “I ain’t letting them do to you what they did to James.”

“Kid’s got more balls than the last one, doesn’t he?” Valentine muses. “Didn’t that one, like, kill himself? Something like that?”

“He threw himself in front of a train,” Gazelle helpfully informs, giving Eggsy a once over that seems to leave her distinctly unimpressed.

“That’s right,” Valentine says. “Kingsman sure don’t breed them like they used to.”

The stony mask is back in full force as Harry politely smiles and claps Valentine on the shoulder congenially before gripping it tight in warning. “You won’t get away with whatever you’re planning. I promise you that much.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Valentine says just as pleasantly. “You don’t even know what’s going to happen, and by the time you do, it’ll have already been too late. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask, since you people parade around as tailors and all: I’ve been invited to go Ascoting with the Queen. What does a man wear to a thing like that anyway?”

“Royal Ascot requires formal dress in black or grey with a waistcoat and tie,” Harry says. “Don’t forget the top hat.”

“Ah, that’s right!” Valentine grins, snapping his fingers. “See, I just knew there was still some use to you still, Harry. Don’t listen to the haters. And who knows? We may just be seeing each other sooner than you think.” Eggsy gets a carefree nod. “Kid.”

And all he can do is watch as they walk right out the front door to the waiting private car they must have pulled up in.

When they’re out of earshot, Eggsy rounds on Harry with an incredulous look. “What was that even?”

“Gloating,” Harry says grimly before turning and striding away.

 _Did he always have to be so bloody dramatic?_ Eggsy asks himself as he hurries to catch up with Harry’s long stride. “Where are you going?”

“To see Merlin.”

“Because…?” 

“Because I’ve planted a bug on Valentine and now I need to hear what he’s saying.”

“What? Why don’t we just ask Arthur what’s going on?” Because surely whatever it was they talked about wasn’t good, right? And surely Arthur was mobilising forces or whatever the fuck it was right now?

Harry finally stops, causing Eggsy to nearly run into his back. “Because you were right, Eggsy.”

“Harry….”

“Go back to the dormitory now.”

“But—”

Harry turns on him, suddenly reminding Eggsy of the first time they had ever met, just before Harry had reached out with a hand and choked the ever living fuck out of him. “Your part here is done, Galahad. You are not a full agent yet until all your assessments are complete. Go. That’s an order.”

Eggsy hadn’t realised just how much of Harry’s good will he’d been taking for granted, had been reliant upon, until it is suddenly absent, vanished like a hopeful possibility. It leaves him feeling like the rug’s been pulled right out from under him: disoriented, shaken, not quite able to collect himself until he’s seeing the back of Harry walking away from him again.


	9. Chapter 9

_Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe—his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick._

 

_____

 

Eggsy had to be mad, doing this, but he still remembers the terror clawing at his throat, the hiss of Gazelle’s too sharp blades coming too close to his vulnerable flesh. He didn’t ever want to feel that terrified, that vulnerable, not ever again. He can easily put any of the Kay clones on their back during training, but against an experienced, hardened fighter, he barely got out by the skin of his teeth.

Which is why Lancelot prowls around him in a circle, as predatorily graceful as a large cat, gaze cool and calculating while every glance cast in his direction pins him to the wall like a dartboard.

“Again,” Lancelot commands, and though Eggsy just wants to fold himself into a ball and wave the white flag, he sucks in a breath and goes on the offencive.

In the hours they’ve been at this for as many days in a row, he’s at least been improving. Not so clumsy or slow or leaving himself laughably wide open to attack. He doesn’t try to take Lancelot head on anymore, coming in swinging like a drunken lout. More strategic in his feints and less obvious in his attack points.

Doesn’t really make all that difference in the end, though. Lancelot has him flat on his back inside of two minutes. From the sidelines, JB merely yawns and lowers his head onto his paws. So much for support and sympathy from that one.

“A new record,” she says, not even out of breath, not even having broken a sweat. “You’re getting better. Somewhat.”

Eggsy remains splayed out on the mat. She had knocked the breath out of him good this time, she did, and he’s not moving anytime soon between the way every muscle in his body seems to ache and the sheer bloody existential exhaustion. “This sucks,” he surmises. JB takes this as his cue to stand up, stretch, and trot over to Eggsy, sniffing at the sweat that dots his brow before trying to give his entire face a wash. “Ugh—Jesus, JB, stop.”

“You’re still thinking too much. You’re trying to remember your training and go through the motions. You’re not letting it connect to your own body,” Lancelot remarks before pursing her lips in thought, watching Eggsy’s struggles in trying to keep JB’s face away from his, before saying, “And you know your body, don’t you, Eggsy? You told me you used to do free running before. You trusted your body to do what you wanted it to. You had full control over it.”

“Well, yeah,” Eggsy says like it’s obvious. Finally, JB gives up with a huff of rank-smelling breath in Eggsy’s face like it's one final assault before stepping up onto him and settling down on his chest. “You hesitate the moment you take that leap and you could wind up killing yourself.” He winces, partly because of his slip, partly because JB is fucking heavy. “Er, well, you know what I mean.”

“Fighting works off the same premise,” she says, ignoring his verbal mishap with perfect grace. Class act, that Lancelot is. “Don’t just go through a set of moves and combinations because you’ve been told to do them. Do what comes naturally, and before you say that none of this comes naturally to you, that’s why we’re practising until it does.”

“I guess I just don’t have the killer instinct,” Eggsy tries to joke.

“You’re a Kingsman creation,” Lancelot says. “You do, more than you know.”

Eggsy frowns. That’s not exactly a comforting thought.

Upon seeing his ambivalence, Lancelot sighs and folds her legs beneath her to sit by his head, reaching over to run her fingers through JB’s fur and scratch behind his ears. She looks much less intimidating like that, a small girl charmed by a small dog. “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting you didn’t grow up like we did.”

“Is it strange to work with me? Does it bother you?” Eggsy asks before he can think better of it. He can’t help remembering Harry’s stricken face as he opened all those letters, sharply reminded again of his loss, like the cartoon character that runs off the edge of a cliff and finally decides to look down.

Lancelot looks down at him, and Eggsy gets the feeling she’s scrutinising his features, doing that thing where she doesn’t blink, seeing right through him again. “I think every model has similar traits, just as every model’s generation does. Sometimes, yes, you will do or say something that reminds me of him. But you’re...unique.” She smiles, just a little. “I could never confuse the two of you. You’re so much more...confident in what you are, but maybe more importantly, in what you are not. Sometimes I look at you and think you’re what Galahad had been struggling to become. It makes me feel better, to know that what he had been striving for is not impossible.”

Before Eggsy can open his mouth to reply, to ask, maybe, for more insight into his predecessor, the doors to the gym open and Merlin appears in the doorway, grim-faced as always. “Eggsy, you’re wanted in Arthur’s office.”

When Eggsy glances back at Lancelot, he sees her wearing the same furrowed brow expression as he feels himself making. Worried, maybe, for him? “Sorry, love, guess we’re through for the day.” He can’t exactly make himself employ enough regret over it.

She gives him a flat, unimpressed look. “I’ll expect us to pick up where we left off tomorrow morning at seven.”

His jaw nearly drops. “God, you’re killing me, woman.”

Lancelot, however, remains merciless as she moves from her previous indecorous position, standing tall and proud, but Eggsy catches a faint smirk lifting at one corner of her mouth. “Funny, here I was thinking I was saving you.”

 

_____

 

Given his previous encounters, Eggsy finds himself approaching Arthur’s office door with no small amount of trepidation, desperately wishing that Harry would somehow coincidentally fall into line beside him before his knuckles ever made contact with that old polished wood. At his feet, JB merrily trots along beside him, peering up at Eggsy and giving him his open-mouthed, tongue-panting grin every time he feels his owner’s gaze.

But soon enough, he reaches Arthur’s door, and there is no Harry, and he can’t hover in the hall forever. With a mind to rip the plaster off in one go, Eggsy raises his hand to the door, knocks, and waits to hear the muffled, “Come in.”

Eggsy takes a deep breath and opens the door, only finding the nerve to put half his body through. “Merlin said you wanted to see me, sir?”

Arthur’s office is appropriately huge, traditional and grandiose, rich in heavy wooden furnishings from the bookshelves to the executive style desk to the tables, sideboards, and chairs. More large portraits hang on the walls where there isn’t a large window to let in the afternoon light and a large, undoubtedly expensive, Persian rug covers most of the floor. Arthur himself reclines in one of the two chairs situated in front of the fireplace with a glass of scotch, a fire merrily ablaze despite the fact that summer is coming on well and strong. It makes the room stuffy and overheated, which, too, feels appropriate. 

“Sit down,” Arthur says, nodding to the other empty chair across from him.

Eggsy hesitates for only half a second before entering the room, JB easily blazing the trail forward, trotting circles around Eggsy and the chair he is about to sit in, hooting in a somewhat embarrassing manner, as if he needed to show Arthur how wild at heart he still very much is. 

Arthur’s gaze slants towards JB. “Pretty dog. What’s his name?”

Finally JB settles down on, of all things, a large, clear plastic tarp, which strikes Eggsy as odd, but considering how so much of Kingsman is, he’s learned not to question either it or Arthur’s awkward attempt at pleasantries. “JB.”

“As in, James Bond?”

Eggsy winces just a little. This conversation again. “No.”

“Jason Bourne?”

“No,” Eggsy says, this time smiling a little sheepishly. “...Jack Bauer?”

“Oh!” The look of perplexed surprise briefly flickers across Arthur’s features before Eggsy receives his figurative condescending pat on the head. “Bravo.”

Finally, Eggsy decides that's enough niceties have been exchanged and goes for it. “I saw Valentine leaving your office last week.”

For his part, Arthur doesn’t even look surprised, though he hardly looks pleased either. “I take it Harry’s explained to you Valentine’s history with this organisation.”

“He did. Got to hear firsthand what he did to James too, so why was he allowed to waltz in and outta here?”

“Do you really think Valentine would walk into his enemy’s lair without an insurance policy?” Arthur asks with a withering stare.

Put like that, well, no. Chastened, Eggsy stares at his hands in his lap.

The show of submission puts Arthur at ease, at least enough to say, “Valentine and Kingsman have grown to become rivals over the years, but our areas of interest don’t really overlap anymore. Valentine caters to mass market consumers. It’s not something Kingsman has ever been interested in pursuing. In that sense, we’ve both been content to live and let live. Occasionally, however, Valentine enjoys dipping a toe in our waters just to see if we’re still paying attention. That’s what our meeting was about. Nothing of consequence.”

The explanation doesn’t sit quite right. Eggsy wants to bring up the ultimatum he had overheard, but that would be admitting to having eavesdropped. “He experimented on James. _Killed him_. I’d think you’d at least be upset about your agent dying.”

“James wasn’t an agent anymore, and had long exceeded his sell-by date, if you will. The damage done wasn’t all that significant in the grand scheme of things and Valentine has agreed to compensate us for the loss. I consider the matter settled and the case has been officially closed.” Arthur shrugs dismissively. “But I didn’t call you in here to discuss this. I called you in here because it pains me to admit it, Eggsy, but one day you may be as good a spy as any of them.”

Still reeling from the knowledge that everything was getting swept under the rug, the unexpected praise catches Eggsy off guard. In fact, he’s still trying to process it all that he doesn’t even truly register Arthur retrieving a gun from his inner jacket until he’s pointing it right at him.

Eggsy starts to sit up, alarm coursing down his spine, when Arthur suddenly flips the gun to hold it out to him, handle first, and says, “Take it.”

Numbly, Eggsy does, feeling the heavy weight of it in his hand cut through any last hopes he may have had that it were fake. He doesn’t know why his stomach feels so leaden given how Kingsman insisted they train with firearms every single bloody day. Eggsy himself is something of a natural sharpshooter, a skill he happily lorded over the Kay clones whose marksmanship skills were more uneven.

“Shoot the dog.”

“What?” At first, Eggsy isn’t sure he’s heard it right. He stares at Arthur stupidly, but Arthur's face doesn't change from its perfectly fucking dourness.

“You heard me,” Arthur says calmly.

It suddenly dawns on Eggsy that no agent he has seen at Kingsman has ever been accompanied by the furry companion from their assessments. Not James. Not Harry. Not even Lancelot. 

The tarp. It’s there to protect Arthur’s precious rug from getting ruined by blood.

Eggsy looks at JB. He even, he’s ashamed to admit, raises the gun and points it at him. JB stares up at him, practically vibrating with the desire to start running about. Eggsy wishes that he would, but for once, the stupid little beast obeys his training and remains right where he is as an easy target, like he’s daring Eggsy to do it.

His hand starts shaking.

He’s already shaking his head, even before he’s lowering his arm again. He can’t do it. Fuck. He can’t fucking do it.

“Give me the gun.” There’s a heavy note of disgust in Arthur’s voice.

It’s _infuriating_.

Eggsy raises his arm again, pointing the gun at Arthur, and for a brief moment, he imagines squeezing the trigger. There would be a look of surprise on the old man’s face then. _How much does_ that _pain you?_

His train of resentful thoughts is sharply derailed by the sound of a gunshot.

At first, Eggsy fears his darker desires had gotten the better of him, but no, the shot came from somewhere down the hall. He practically throws the gun into Arthur’s lap with horror. Which one had killed their own fucking dog? Charlie, Eggsy thought. Charlie would have done.

“At least someone’s got balls around here,” Arthur sneers. “Would you like to know what happens to those who fail, Eggsy?”

As if in answer, four more gunshots punch through the air in quick succession. Arthur smiles.

There can only be one, Eggsy remembers. He wants to throw up.

“Merlin, bring in our new Agent Kay and have cleanup deal with the rest of the mess,” Arthur says. “You see, Eggsy? We reward our successes and rid ourselves of our failures. I would have had done the same to you, but we’re in somewhat of a unique situation here, aren’t we?”

Eggsy only half-listens to Arthur’s words.

He hates the way the posh politeness of them is so at odds with his cruel thoughts and actions.

He hates how Kingsman is old and venerable in appearance, from its large estate to antique furnishings, and yet beneath its polished, gleaming halls lies a history of ugliness.

He hates how they are monsters in beautiful, bespoke suits.

“You’re absolutely right, Arthur,” Eggsy says, relishing the way Arthur’s brows shoot up to his hairline. It feeds the fire of his fury, motivating him to reach out and sweep JB safely into his arms before standing and looming over him, regarding him like he isn’t worth the dirt beneath Eggsy’s boots. “It seems we’ve arrived at an impasse. You’re in the business of creating sociopathic murderers and treating human beings as little more than disposable property, and I’d rather die than become anything like you.”

With his own sneer, he turns and storms out of Arthur’s office without waiting for a dismissal, his heart pounding in his ears, face hot, feeling a tight vice on his lungs that’s making it hard to breathe.

He nearly runs right into Charlie, because of course it is Charlie, who shouts a, “Hey!” at him, but Eggsy ignores it.

His vision grows tunnelled, but his feet keep moving him further and further away from the viper’s pit, and though he’s not consciously aware of where he’s going, he ends up before Harry’s door anyway, turning the handle and entering Harry’s rooms without bothering to knock.

Harry is at his desk, laptop open, a cordial of brandy at his left. If he’s surprised by Eggsy’s abrupt arrival, he barely shows it so much as annoyance and disapproval. 

“Did you shoot your dog?” Eggsy asks him outright. “You raised a dog and taught it to love and obey and trust you and then you killed it. Looked it in the eyes and just….”

Harry looks at him for a long time before saying, simply, “Yes.”

“You sick freak,” Eggsy says, hugging JB closer to him. “All of you. You’re all fucked up, aren’t you? I can see that now. I tried so hard to not believe it, but it's just one thing after another, after another. That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me all along, innit? You’re not people. Real people don’t act like this, they don’t...they don’t _do_ this.”

“What did you do, Eggsy?” Harry asks, gaze flickering uneasily to JB still cradled in his arms.

“I couldn’t do it,” Eggsy tells him, as if it weren't obvious enough. “I wouldn’t. And then they killed the others. There can only be one Agent Kay, yeah? God, that’s so fucked up. You’re all so fucked up. And you know what? I told Arthur that much too.”

Harry stands up and rounds his desk, staring Eggsy down fiercely. “You foolish, short-sighted boy.” It’s the angriest Eggsy has ever seen him. Voice cold and cutting him down to the quick. “Do you want to go through what your father went through? Because that’s what happens to those Kingsman no longer finds useful, Eggsy! And for what? You’d throw your life away over a fucking dog?”

“But it’s not just the dog!” Eggsy shoots back. “You killed or helped to kill actual innocent human beings for this. You watched them drown, while they choked on blood in their own lungs and their brains fried themselves up inside their skulls and stood back, _relieved_ , that it was one less in the competition! You looked them in the eye and snatched the chute off their backs! No wonder why Galahad killed himself. He saw he was becoming like you!”

Harry physically flinches from the words like they are a physical blow, and immediately Eggsy regrets them, wishing he could snatch them back, as Harry now regards him with a flat expression that is nearly bleak. “Because we were never real, Eggsy. We don’t matter until one of us is fortunate enough to earn agent status, and then we stop mattering again once we’ve been replaced by something better. Our lives have always been disposable. Even those of us released out into the world, oblivious, are little more than variables to be studied for a blind experiment that can conclude at any moment.” 

But before Eggsy can open his mouth again, Harry’s glasses beep, and Harry swiftly moves away from Eggsy to hold his conversation with some modicum of privacy. It’s a brief one, whatever it is. Eggsy hears Harry mutter something about a church and leaving soon, and then he’s signing off, turning to face Eggsy once more. The interruption has given him time to fortify himself. He’s as remote and untouchable to Eggsy as he had been on that first day, flinty and quietly threatening with a hard line to his mouth.

Still. Still, Eggsy tries. “Harry, I didn’t mean it about Galahad. I’m so sor—”

“You’re not him. You didn’t know him, you will never be him, and you could certainly never replace him,” Harry cuts him off, and this time it’s Eggsy who flinches. “Stay here and lock the doors. Don’t let anyone in and don’t speak to anyone, do you understand? I’ll sort this mess when I get back.”

Harry’s going to leave, Eggsy realises. Harry still isn’t done with Valentine. It sends a spike of panic through him, though he can’t pinpoint exactly why, but Harry needs to know. “Harry...about Valentine. Arthur said—”

“It’s no longer your concern,” Harry snaps. “You’ve done enough damage for now, so kindly stay out of my way.”

Harry doesn’t look at him again, striding towards the door and exiting without another word or glance back.

 

_____

 

For all that Harry’s rooms afford him every luxury and comfort he could desire in his off time, there isn’t a whole lot to do. Harry hasn’t even got a telly. Most of his books are written in foreign languages. Eggsy is left to study the bizarrely decorated walls now that he’s got the time, a smattering of paintings of uninspired landscapes and dog portraits and actual dead bugs pinned up and framed. He doesn’t dare to do much more snooping than that, figures he’s more than lost the right, if ever he had earned it.

The stillness, the isolation, gets to him, knowing he’s in the belly of the beast but must do nothing. Wondering what Harry is doing, has been up to, knowing it’s under Arthur’s nose. Is Merlin helping him? Is Harry going rogue? And, in a peak, anxious moment of paranoia, Eggsy can’t help but wonder, _Is Harry working with Valentine?_ No. Never.

He tries to sleep on Harry’s sofa, but only doses in small stops and starts. He paces. He tries to get JB to play fetch, but JB only looks at him, unimpressed. “You’re barely a dog,” Eggsy accuses.

Finally, his restlessness drives him to a near breaking point. He can’t stay here, cooped up, but he can’t leave, not when he’s all but asked Arthur to execute him. But, as Eggsy stares at Harry’s open laptop, there are other ways to explore the world.

The laptop wakens to Eggsy’s touch, not even locked. Harry must have been so distracted by Eggsy’s abrupt arrival and immediate launch into accusations that he hadn’t had the time nor mind to employ his usual security measures. It causes him to feel a momentary pang of guilt for that, but he can’t deny that he’s grateful for it now as all of Harry’s laptop and its credentials are now available for him to explore.

It’s tempting to snoop about the various directories Harry keeps on his drive, neatly organised, barely decipherable by some innocuous coded label. But what really grabs Eggsy’s attention is the blinking live icon feed that is apparently connected right to Harry’s glasses. Once Eggsy pulls up the window, he’s treated to a streamed view straight from Harry’s glasses.

Harry _is_ in some sort of church, judging by its rows of hard-backed, wooden pews. The various crucifix paraphernalia and stained glass windows being another giveaway. It seems like a simple enough church, one large nave, high-ceilings, altar at the forefront, pious people avidly listening, shouting...not a vicar, Eggsy realises, turning up the audio.

About five seconds later, he wishes he hadn’t.

“Charming sermon,” Eggsy hears Merlin dryly remark, and can’t help but feel just a little bit better, knowing Merlin is there with Harry, that Harry isn’t doing whatever the fuck he’s up to alone.

Why and how Harry’s covert research somehow led him to this place, Eggsy, will never know. The raving, sweating, barmy man at the front spewing vitriol sounds distinctly American, so too does the woman giving Harry a hard time. Valentine isn’t at the church, Harry’s established, and, having deemed he will find nothing of further interest there, woman stunned into silence with an admittedly inspired quip, Harry stands up and starts walking down the main aisle.

At first, Eggsy isn’t sure what’s happening. The ranting of the preacher suddenly trails off. Everyone’s shoulders just all seem to...relax, like puppets that have had their strings cut. Harry’s looking at the front exit, but from the periphery of his feed, Eggsy can see them, the zombie-like trance the other churchgoers have fallen into, heads sinking to their chests.

“Harry?” Merlin asks. “Harry, what’s going on?”

Harry doesn’t answer. The view from his glasses shifts downward, giving them a full if uninteresting view of the floor, like Harry’s been caught up in it too.

The silent stillness is unnerving.

At least until Harry slowly turns around, pulls out his service weapon, and shoots the woman who had trailed angrily after him right in the face.

And then everything goes to absolute shit.

The churchgoers start attacking each other, hurting each other, _killing_ each other in various gruesome ways with a single-minded rabidness. Harry’s hands on the feed become deadly weapons, shooting, stabbing, strangling, bludgeoning using various implements at his disposal, and many times, nothing at all but his own strength and speed in such rapid, endless succession, never tiring, that Eggsy isn’t sure he hasn't accidentally fallen asleep on Harry's sofa after all and is currently dreaming up some bizarre, bloody nightmare.

Merlin is frantically shouting over the comms, but Harry doesn’t appear to hear him as he burns a man’s face with the highest setting on his lighter. Bones are breaking and bodily organs are being wetly pierced and each time another frenzied attacker comes into Harry’s feed, Eggsy is _certain_ this will be the one to take Harry down, leave him as a listless, bleeding body on the floor like all the others, but each time, Harry blocks the attack, turns the momentum on his attacker and leaves them a barely twitching corpse in the time it takes Eggsy to wince and turn his head away, panicky and nauseated.

If this is Harry, supposedly diminished from what he had been in his prime as Agent Galahad, Eggsy wouldn’t have wanted to have been on the wrong side of his gun ten years ago, much less now.

Just as suddenly as the chaos had begun, it ends when Harry unhesitatingly impales the preacher’s head on a broken-off, makeshift wooden spike.

It’s now dead quiet in the church, shockwave lines of bodies draped over the upturned pews, pools of blood spreading out beneath them. So many, everywhere Harry turns as the lone survivor.

No one, not even Merlin, says anything. Eggsy hears his breath coming out in pants from his lips, his heart pounding so hard in his chest that it hurts.

When Harry wordlessly staggers out of the church, Valentine, Gazelle, and a few gun-toting henchmen are there to greet him beneath the bright afternoon sun. A licence plate from a nearby car pins the location as Kentucky.

“What did you do to me?” Harry asks, sounding as stunned as Eggsy feels. “I had no control. I killed all those people. I wanted to.”

Valentine steps forward. “Clever, isn’t it? My latest and greatest work. In simple terms, it’s a neurological wave that sends the brain into a subconscious state and leaves it open to subliminal suggestion. I admit our current directives are a bit simplistic at the moment—kill—but for our immediate purposes, it’ll work just fine.”

“Transmitted through your nasty free SIM cards, I assume,” Harry says with palpable disgust. “Why? Why would you do this?”

Valentine tilts his head, giving Harry a long, considering look. “Gazelle—” The woman in question darts her eyes to Valentine, her only reaction, before pinning Harry once more with her attentiveness. Eggsy can’t tell if the look was annoyance or exasperation. “—Would tell me that I have a tendency to ramble on. Less talk, more action, she wants, but I feel like I owe you an explanation, Harry. I know you thought all this time we were working together in good faith, and I’m sorry it’s come down to this.”

And that...that one catches Eggsy wrong footed. A sinking sensation in his gut tells him all his worst fears have been confirmed, followed swiftly by the sense of wrenching betrayal and then prompt denial. Harry couldn't have known about _this_.

“I always liked you more than the other freaks. You always seemed more... _alive_ up there,” Valentine says, tapping his temple. “I know Kingsman’s spent countless resources into making you and your little clone club. They’ve always taken pride in their wastefulness, haven’t they, because they just have so much of it: money, power. But for what, I ask? To create a small band of little clone superspies? To make little insignificant dings here and there in world policy?” Valentine says, laughing a little. “Harry, I’m into agile management these days. I believe in the Eighty Twenty rule. Eighty percent of results should come from twenty percent of the effort. Why waste so much of the world’s finite and rapidly dwindling resources to create new bug-ridden humans to do your dirty work when you can leverage what we have already in abundance, such as, oh, let’s see, an excess human population, instead? You want an obedient army at your disposal? I got that right here with this one little signal and all these little chips.”

“Turning the world into your mindless slaves,” Harry surmises. Eggsy desperately wishes he could see Harry’s face, to get even a hint of what he was thinking. “Once they realise what has happened, how long do you think you’ll get away with it? You haven’t managed to implant that many people with your chip.”

“Ah, but see, that’s where you’re wrong about me. I’m not trying to enslave the world’s entire population as it currently stands. I was serious when I said we suffer from _excess_. That may be what Kingsman likes, but it’s not something I really go for, you know?”

“What is it you’re trying to do now?”

“What’s that expression again, ‘trim the fat’? You’d know a little something about that, right Harry? I believe you’re pretty much considered redundant at Kingsman now that they got your new mini-me on board.” Almost casually, Valentine reaches into his jacket, revealing his own gun, metal catching a glint of sun. He raises his arm and points it at Harry, the barrel of it sitting in the centre of the screen, pulling Eggsy’s focus to it like it's a gaping black hole. “So after the monologue, is this the part where you make some witty quip and reveal you’ve just been biding your time until the cavalry arrived or you figured out some daring and contrived escape?”

“No,” Harry says, startling Eggsy with the resigned tenor of it, absent of Harry’s usual cool, collected wit. “Because this was never my story to begin with, but know this won’t end with me.”

“Maybe not,” Valentine concedes. “But I think we can both agree that your part of the tale is done.”

It happens in a flash of smoke and fire, a reverberating bang cracking through the air and the feed from Harry’s glasses suddenly cuts out.

Eggsy is screaming. He’s screaming before he realises he is, screaming before he notices that his throat is sore and his ears are ringing and his heart is in his throat.

Eggsy tries to take deep breaths. He pushes away from Harry’s desk and casts his gaze about Harry’s room, seeking some anchor to moor his wildly reeling mind. He blindly stumbles over to Harry’s liquor cabinet and pours himself a liberal dose of scotch, swallowing it down in two gulps, savouring the burn in his mouth, throat, and stomach.

For the first time in a long while, he’s not entirely certain what he should do. Every choice feels inadequate, impossible. Harry told him to stay put. Harry said he’d fix this. Harry said he’d be back. Harry is dead.

Eggsy has always known his position at Kingsman was tenuous at best, but the feeling of immediate threat had never seemed to really manifest for him until now. Anyone could die here. Even him. Probably him.

And for a very long time, he seriously considers running. He’s good at it, has slipped out of many a tight scrape before. He could disappear, stay under the radar, try and go back to the life of anonymity he had enjoyed before Kingsman even knew he existed and hope that whatever Valentine had planned would be stopped by the rest of Kingsman. Eggsy believed Lancelot could stop anyone, she was the far superior agent to them all, and he was nothing more than a poor successor to Harry’s legacy, to Galahad’s, having done nothing but fucked it all up and hurt so many people in the process.

 _You’re what Galahad had been struggling to become. It makes me feel better, to know that what he had been striving for is not impossible_ , Lancelot had said.

 _You have the capacity within you to be even better_ , Harry had told him once too.

Eggsy looks at JB, whose eyes slowly droop in preparation for trouble-free napping. He half-wishes he could join him, but he can’t sit here anymore. He has to try, but especially for all those who no longer can.

He’s half-expecting someone to catch him out, drag him off to a secret room and have him shot, but Kingsman’s halls remain practically empty as he moves swiftly through them, JB loyally ever at his side, as his gaze tries to pierce every shadowy corner and his ears strain to catch anyone hiding, lying in wait.

His footsteps seem sure of their direction, but he doesn’t realise where he’s ended up until he’s staring at Arthur’s closed office door, not feeling at all anxious anymore, simply...tired. His hands reach for the knob and without knocking, he pushes it open and steps through.

The scene is immediately familiar, and it gives him pause, like he’s stepped back ever so briefly in time without knowing it. Arthur sits in the same seat as he had before his lit fireplace, a drink in hand. If it weren’t for the opaque darkness glimpsed through the windows, Eggsy would have checked the floor for the tarp.

Arthur regards his unannounced arrival with only a scowl of irritation, and Eggsy isn’t sure exactly what he had meant to do when he came here except to say, quite obviously, “Arthur, Harry’s dead.”

“Harry disobeyed direct orders and personally went after Valentine anyway,” Arthur says. “As far as I’m concerned, Valentine had every right to take care of the problem.”

Eggsy isn’t sure why he should even be surprised anymore, much less immediately outraged, by Arthur’s continued indifference over the loss of his agents, but he is. The casual disregard for life stirs the ever-burning fire in his veins until his hands are shaking by his sides. “But you heard about his plan with the SIM cards! If it weren’t for Harry, we’d never know what he’s gonna do. Everyone’s in danger! We’ve got to stop him!” Surely, Eggsy wants to scream at him, surely that matters if nothing else?

Arthur sighs like Eggsy’s just told him something particularly stupid and sets his glass down on the table before standing up and stepping towards Eggsy. “I think it’s time for a little honestly, don’t you think? Valentine is working to clean up a few of our common problems. I see little reason to stand in his way.”

“What? No. You refused him. You...we heard....”

The admission of eavesdropping doesn’t faze Arthur. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d be a fool to accept one of his implants. But we did reach an agreement. He would give me enough warning when he was about to set off his worldwide signal so we can adequately prepare for it here at Kingsman, and in return, we would let him get on with it. It has mutually beneficial outcomes and aligns with Kingsman's own processes very well: Culling the wheat from the chaff, that is to say, ridding the world of most of its population so as to save it. What you have left is what’s most valuable, what we’ll use to build a new era.”

“Like what? An era where everyone’s been turned into a brainwashed slave? The ones who haven’t been told to kill themselves and each other, that is?”

“Once Valentine explained it to me, I understood. Loyalty and obedience, Eggsy,” Arthur says. “As you can see, they’ve been recurring problems at Kingsman. Unfortunately, we can’t seem to properly breed it into our agents nor raise them to strictly adhere to it, but at least we can now ensure it via other means. Valentine turns out to have been right about that. We’ve wasted so many decades regarding each other as enemies, and just think, once we pair our superior genetics research with Valentine’s technology: we can finally create the perfect agent.”

“That’s all this is,” Eggsy whispers, hardly daring to believe it. “Wanting to achieve perfection. Willing to end the world for it.”

“There’s a place for you, Eggsy,” Arthur tells him, resting a large, heavy hand on his shoulder. “You, Lancelot, and now Kay are our most sophisticated generation yet. Join me now, pledge your loyalty to Kingsman, and all your earlier transgressions will be forgiven. When this is all over, we can start afresh, and once you have the necessary chips implanted, you won’t ever have to worry about anything ever again. You will have fulfilled your perfect purpose. You’ll be a part of something greater than yourself, working towards a better world. You’ll finally belong. Isn’t that something you always wanted? Aren't you tired of it all right now, Eggsy?”

It’s absolutely twisted how very much Arthur is right about those things. Yeah, Harry had said he didn’t have much of a choice in taking on Galahad’s title, but there was still a part of Eggsy that _wanted to_ , was eager. He wanted to prove himself. Wanted to be accepted. Wanted to belong to something.

Even though Harry had rejected him. Even though Harry was now dead.

He _is_ tired. “What do I gotta do?”

Arthur reaches into his jacket and pulls out his gun, only this time he holds it out to Eggsy handle first, congenially. “Prove how loyal you can be.” He looks at JB. “Shoot the dog.”

Eggsy stares at JB and feels his vision grow blurry. His eyes start to sting. Everything feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. There’s no way to win this, he realises. Not against something as old and large and powerful as Kingsman, not now, especially, when it’s joined forces with Valentine to take over the whole fucking world.

 _We’re all disposable_ , Eggsy thinks, lifting the gun, flicking the safety off. _We aren’t any of us real._

So what did it matter?

Eggsy meets JB’s serene, trusting gaze before pointing the gun at Arthur, sighting right between his startled eyes, and pulling the trigger.

 

_____

 

_Dear Harry,_

_I was never good at judging time. I share your propensity for tardiness, though unlike you, much of mine is unintentional. It is as if in our tendency to live in the moment, trying to measure time ceases to have all meaning. I fear, though, our time has run out, my love._

_You know me, Harry. I am too curious. You always said one day it would get me into trouble, and you were right. How I wish I had listened to you all along. But I cannot unknow what I know, and what I now know is this: after everything, we thought there would be time for us. Or maybe only I did._

_After what, I am now not so sure, perhaps I’ve been deluding myself all along, but now there isn’t even that, I’ve learned._

_There is no retirement. There will be no relaxing days of overeating or sunning ourselves or rolling around the sheets or rereading our books just because we can. There is no Santorini or Majorca or Cypress. Once they have wrung from you all that they can, Harry, they will take you down to our bottom most sublevel and the only way you will return from it is as ash. Your one last contribution._

_To think I had always greatly admired how lush our lawns and foliage were._

_I now know there is only one thing left I can do. There are many things they control about us, but they cannot control how and who we love and they cannot control this._

_I know that energy cannot be created nor destroyed in this closed system of ours, that you will simply go on to exist in another form, but I do not ever want to exist in a different form from you, Harry, whether that is as a human or as shared memories or as particles in the ground, forever entwined._

_When you go to the ground, my love, I will be there, waiting for you. I will always wait for you. Only then, I have realised, shall we finally be free._

_Galahad_


	10. Chapter 10

_The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop…_

_...although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea._

 

_____

 

Time passes. Eggsy can’t say how long, minutes or hours. He knows there’s something urgent he’s missing, but for the life of him, he cannot recall what it is. The forgetfulness is terrifying to the point of paralysis, so he doesn’t want to leave. This is the only thing he knows: dog, gun, the cooling body on the floor with most of its head blown off. He had accidentally used the shotgun cartridge. The close proximity had yielded an extraordinary mess. On the floor, the furniture, the walls and portraits, even the ceiling. JB’s fur had been dotted in bits of it, which Eggsy had hastily tried to clean off with his sleeve. There really hadn’t been a tarp large enough to prevent all of this, he thinks hysterically.

This is how Merlin finds him: sitting on a relatively unscathed patch of floor a few feet away Arthur’s body, crushing a tolerant JB to his chest, gun still loosely gripped in his hand. When Eggsy looks up and takes in Merlin’s poleaxed expression, he suddenly realises how this looks. Fuck, it _is_ how it looks. “Arthur was a traitor,” he tries to explain anyway. “He was going to let Valentine carry out his plans with the SIM cards and then put implants in all of us to make us blindly obedient.”

It occurs to Eggsy that this may not be enough to justify his actions, much less absolve him. That maybe Merlin isn’t particularly disturbed by Arthur’s intentions, as inured to his leader’s cold-blooded behaviour as he has become over the years. People work for leaders they don’t agree with or even believe in all the time, but what is fairly inarguable and even unacceptable: killing a legal British citisen. It's certainly not excused by hatred nor anger.

But Merlin doesn’t call for backup or take Eggsy’s gun and seek justice. He doesn’t look particularly saddened or upset either as he carefully moves around the body, miraculously avoiding any pools of blood and brain matter embellishing the floor, and sits behind Arthur’s desk to open his laptop. “Arthur,” Merlin says, pulling out a slim USB stick and inserting it into the laptop’s port, “Always had his glasses feed record to his private servers, which were only accessible to him. This is the first time I will have ever been able to get into them.”

“You’re...you’re not going to arrest me?” Eggsy asks, confused and tentative. He slowly stands up and hisses at the tingling sensation that prickles down his numb legs.

“If what you say is true, then it should be easy to verify, which means we have more pressing concerns than an executed traitor,” Merlin says, typing away and grimacing before something flashes in the reflection of his glasses and he makes a victorious sound in the back of his throat. “Ah, there we are.” Goals apparently achieved, he glances up at Eggsy over the rim of the monitor. “Would you like to watch?”

Would he…? “No,” Eggsy says. “I really wouldn’t.”

“Suit yourself,” Merlin says, his tone conveying the verbal equivalent of a shrug. His gaze falls back to the computer, and without looking up again, he adds, “There’s blood on your clothes. You should change if you don’t want anyone asking questions.”

Eggsy pulls JB a little aways from his body and looks down at himself, taking in the various spots of dried crimson on his boiler suit, most of it on his sleeves, undoubtedly transferred from fur to clothing. “Right,” he says, suddenly grateful for Merlin’s levelheaded practicality. “Right.”

He starts for the door, but is stopped by Merlin’s, “Eggsy.”

When he turns around, Merlin is not looking at him so much as the gun he still holds in his hand. “Might want to leave that here.”

“Right.” Eggsy sets it down on the table like it’s an unstable bomb. For a wild second, he panics over the fact that his fingerprints are all over the murder weapon before he catches himself. There isn’t exactly going to be a fucking criminal investigation. 

He genuinely does mean to find the showers and change, something, _anything_ , to shake off the layers of wool that have settled around his mind like a thick fog, but JB starts to wriggle impatiently in his hold and eventually manages to make a daring leap from his arms, taking off down the hallway like the undisciplined little wanker he is.

“JB, what the fuck? JB!” Eggsy calls after him, warning him to stop while feeling an irrational stab of betrayal, but JB just keeps running, disappearing around a corner in a scamper of claws and tail.

Eggsy means to go after him at a run, but he no sooner stumbles forward a couple of steps before the weight of all that has happened overcomes him and his legs buckle, dropping him to the floor right in the middle of the hall like a sack of potatoes. How humiliating.

He ought to probably make less of a spectacle of himself, but he’s not sure he has it in him to move again. There just doesn’t feel like any point to doing so. As it is, the quiet darkness gives him more freedom to breathe and get his bearings. He is not so far now from the library, he realises. It’s as good a place as any in which to hide. Better, even, because of how much it had meant to Harry. Maybe Eggsy could find solace in it too.

The library is swathed in its familiar darkness; he doesn’t turn on the lights even though he keeps painfully catching the edges of tables and chairs. The very air in the room feels as sealed and unmoved as a tomb, like no one has disturbed this space since Harry had last been here. It’s quite likely no one had, and this thought drives him to start running his fingers over every surface within reach in some desperate bid to be the first person to touch the last things Harry had, like he could still cling to some trace of the man that way.

It's just so hard to concentrate on any one thing right now that he almost misses it for its lack of obscurity: the book sitting innocently in the middle of the table, like it hadn’t made its anvil impression in the past week and was still ready to do one more: it was a message, clearly meant for Eggsy to find.

He slowly picks up the book and traces the embossed serif type on the cover as the first fissures spiderweb through his restraint. There is a folded up piece of paper neatly wedged just inside the cover, not at all making an effort at subterfuge. The black inked script bleeds through the paper in spots. Eggsy finds himself dreading it.

He opens the thing anyway because he can’t ever not.

 

_____

 

_Dear Eggsy,_

_I want to apologise how we last left things. You are right to feel angry. You are right to be horrified by Kingsman and what we have become. We have callously created and discarded so many lives, so very carelessly. We have forgotten the value of life. We have forgotten what it means to be human._

_Have you ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? It’s commonly misconstrued that Frankenstein is the monster, when in fact, Frankenstein is the monster’s creator, and the one to whom we ought to direct our loathing. I find that book particularly apt now. Who was the greater monster?_

_In short: I found it difficult to accept that I was as human as anyone, because it meant that I was also culpable for what I had done, both for Kingsman and for what happened to Galahad._

_By now I am sure you have suspected the truth. We were in love._

_It was strange and wonderful and frightening. I’m afraid that last got the better of me._

_As with you, Galahad was much wiser than I. He knew himself and what he was. He begged me to understand, but I had refused to listen. I refused to consider myself a human capable of such messy, powerful emotion. Therefore, I could not possibly feel it. Therefore, what we had could not possibly be it._

_I was a fool, Eggsy._

_Out of fear, I had ended it, and forty-eight hours later, after attempting to find a different fate for us and realising the inevitable, Galahad killed himself. I never gave him the love or support he so clearly desperately needed, and then it was too late._

_I imagine that when you read this, I will likely be gone. Call it instinct, but I do believe that when I leave these grounds again, it will be for the last time. Valentine is a dangerous man and I suspect there’s a reluctance in this organisation to stop him. I have to try. You taught me that._

_I don’t say this out of a bid for pity, but as assurance: I look forward to the end, Eggsy. I’ve lived a long, full life, and now I just want to rest and be with the man I love once more._

_Thank you, Eggsy, for being a beacon of light for me in these last dark days. You helped me to realise who I was. You helped me to be human. Now I can be a man who dies with honour._

_Your Predecessor, Your Friend,_

_Harry_

 

_____

 

In all his months at Kingsman, Eggsy’s never seen the subterranean halls and rooms that make up Merlin’s domain, the actual heart and purpose of Kingsman, where extraordinary scientific breakthroughs and ethical atrocities are committed in the same breath.

It’s a completely different atmosphere from the rest of the estate with stark, industrial walls and floors that were built with easier maintenance in mind than aesthetics, lifeless fluorescent lighting, and a distinct lack of personalisation. It’s all honed purpose and function. Eggsy finds the transparency both chilling and soothing at once. This is Kingsman without the pretense and appearances of gentility.

The workers here give him only mild curious glances, but no one questions his presence, dried blood and red swollen eyes and all. What these people must see in their average everyday lives, Eggsy doesn’t know, but he’s grateful for the overall indifference. He doesn’t think he could speak anyways.

Mostly, the R&D department of Kingsman is just a depressing series of windowless laboratories and stale cubicles, but as Eggsy travels deeper into the floor, as the live bodies thin out along with the lighting and pre-fabricated furniture, he uncovers the rooms that might as well have come straight off the set of a horror film, sure to fuel his nightmares for many a night to come.

Rows and rows of fluid-filled tubes, and floating within each of them: suspended bodies, mostly male, of varying ages. They are vaguely familiar, but it’s hard to tell with their faces so unlined and unworn by life. Each tank contains its own dim lighting to highlight the slack features of the body it houses, and together, they all cast a haunting blue hue to the room itself, like Eggsy has walked into some sort of macabre aquarium. The bodies are hooked up to breathing apparatuses, there’s a readout on the outside of each tube that displays their vitals, so they must actually be _alive_ , but—

“Vegetative state. All of them,” Lancelot says. When Eggsy turns his head, he can see her stepping into quiet place beside him, holding a retrieved JB. “The ones who were nonviable. Physically fine, but consciousness never took. Some are experimentals that became brain dead after an accident or illness.”

“Why?” Eggsy manages to ask through his dry mouth. “What’s the point?”

“Testing. Long-term experiments, perhaps. You’d have to ask one of the staff to know for sure,” Lancelot says.

“Am I here?” Eggsy asks, finding the thought particularly disturbing. He doesn’t even want to think about Harry. “Are you?”

“Yes, I’m….” Lancelot starts to walk down the aisles, wordlessly entreating Eggsy to follow her until she comes to a stop before a tank containing a distinctly female form. “This one is more or less my age. Stillborn, apparently.”

Eggsy can barely bring himself to look at this lifeless version of Lancelot, instead choosing to concentrate on the live counterpart, who is watching her twin with something like wonder while idly rubbing JB’s silky ears. “This don’t freak you out?”

“I find it soothing, actually,” Lancelot says. “It’s like she’s sleeping, unaware of what goes on in the world outside and undisturbed by its troubles. I like knowing there is a version of me who can be free of all this.”

Eggsy bites his lips. “Did Merlin tell you what happened?”

“He’s hacking into Arthur’s files right now.” Which is confirmation enough. “There was already a lot there to uncover, even without the discovery Valentine.”

There’s a steel-lined catch to her voice. Eggsy looks at her.

“Do you know what Arthur does when a first-generation agent dies?” Lancelot asks him, though she clearly isn’t expecting an answer as she continues, almost monotone, “It’s like issuing a recall notice. Suddenly all the experimentals out in the wild find themselves meeting various ends, and their bodies brought back here to be permanently disposed of. All physical and legal evidence of their existence is erased. James’s last one died today. Hit and run.”

“Jesus,” Eggsy says as the implications hit home, maybe not as sharply as they should have done, but he’s been running on empty for the better part of the day now. “Jesus. I’m so sorry. Did he...is Harry’s…?”

“No, you intervened before Arthur could make the arrangements,” Lancelot says, giving him a mirthless smile. “His line will get to continue on living, none the wiser. So will yours. So will mine.”

“I’m so sorry,” Eggsy says again, though he can’t help feeling selfishly relieved.

“I want to show you something,” Lancelot says, leading Eggsy further into the room, almost to the very back, where a line of stainless steel industrial-sized coolers cover the wall. “This one,” Lancelot shifts JB to one arm in order to point to the unit at the centre, “Contains us. All of us. Past and future versions of us. Arguably the most precious thing Kingsman owns.”

Eggsy follows her arm to the unit, innocuous looking and inoffencive.

“He was trying to end it, you know,” she says. “Harry was. Well, technically with Merlin and Valentine."

"End?"

"It started back when Valentine worked here. Plans were made to sabotage the work. They all had varying motives, of course. Valentine felt insulted by Kingsman’s unwillingness to embrace his vision. Harry, because of what happened to your father. And Merlin because...well, I suppose he’s long since been fed up with it. It had to be done with care so as to not cause suspicion. It was working, too. The next generation, us, had yielded far less viable embryos. The hopes were that eventually Kingsman’s investors would come to see the whole programme as no longer being worth the investment.”

“Everyone had their secrets.” Eggsy wants to laugh, but fears the sound would reveal its bitter depths. He's tired of feeling bitter. He's tired of the way the past always looms over him, casting it's long shadow. “It ends today," he decides. "Don’t you agree? No more clones. No more of this.”

Lancelot looks at him and he looks back, resolute. Wordlessly, she shoves JB into his arms. Before Eggsy can ask what she’s going to do, she steps forward and pulls from her trouser pocket a familiar gold-plated lighter. “Uh...Lancelot….”

“It’ll be fine,” Lancelot assures him with a brilliant smile before flicking the lighter’s switch and activating its red, blinking light while a series of low beeps warns them of the imminent countdown. She moves to the refrigerator, opens it, and sets the lighter on the middle shelf like she’s putting away the milk before slamming the door shut.

As they walk away, not even the muffled bang resounding behind them can make them look back.

 

_____

 

The message gets sent straight to Arthur’s phone, not meant for any other eyes to see save but those who are in on the plan, but Valentine couldn’t have known.

_V-DAY in 5:49:32:17 HOURS. GET TO A SAFE PLACE OR FLY TO THESE COORDINATES._

“What are you gonna do?” Eggsy asks Merlin when he shows them the message with the ever dwindling countdown.

“The question is, what are _we_ going to do,” Merlin says, looking between Eggsy and Lancelot. “We don’t know who else Arthur has brought in on this and there are certain quarters from which we can expect little assistance either way.”

Eggsy thinks about the newly minted Agent Kay and how utterly useless he'd be here.

“We’ve got to handle this ourselves,” Merlin concludes.

“We won’t be able to get within a mile of this location without tipping Valentine off,” Lancelot points out.

“So we don’t,” Eggsy states, drawing two sets of stares. “We do what Harry would have done: go directly to him, no pretense. Valentine wants Lancelot and I. Wants to give you a job too, right, Merlin? He’ll at least entertain an audience.”

“Yes, well, if you do recall, Harry’s ideas don’t generally end very well,” Merlin says.

“But we can buy you enough time to get into the system,” Lancelot says, more determined now despite the fact she's just implied her probable death.

“We have to try,” Eggsy agrees, the taste of the familiar words sticking in his mouth.

It’s how they end up on a commandeered Kingsman jet flying off to the middle of Siberia not fifteen minutes later. The interior of the plane is, as expected, elegant and not short on luxury. Comfortable leather seats, plenty of leg room. A fully stocked bar, naturally.

Lancelot sits across from him, steadily but comfortably holding his gaze. Neither of them has felt the need to speak, letting the plane’s engines fill the air with white noise. In spite of the situation, it's an atmosphere of calm acceptance. Is this what Harry had meant by instinct?

“Do you like the name Lancelot?” Eggsy asks her.

Lancelot tilts her head slightly as she thinks about it. “I don’t know. I’ve never really stopped to consider it before. Lancelot was just a goal to reach. It meant the difference between life and death. Liking it had very little to do with it.”

“Yeah, but...when your successor got all queued up and you got pushed off active status, had you thought about the name you’d want?”

A shy smile briefly curves at the corners of Lancelot’s mouth before she looks down, prompting Eggsy to persist. “You did, didn’t you? What? What was it?”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“No, I’m not.” And when Lancelot looks at him sceptically, Eggsy raises his hands. “Swear down.”

Somewhat assured, she finally says, “Roxanne. I heard it once in, uh, a song.”

“Roxanne? You mean...oh, please don’t tell me it was Sting. You do realise that song was about a prozzie?”

“I don’t know who it was!” she defends, bristling. “I just liked the name! Roxanne. It felt bold. Roxy, for short.”

“Alright, alright,” he tries to placate. This time, Eggsy smiles. "It’s nice meeting you, Roxy. I’m Eggsy.”

Roxy looks at him for a long time before tentatively smiling too. “We’re going to be alright.”

“I know,” Eggsy says.

“You remember your training. Don’t think, just move.”

“I know,” Eggsy says again.

"I’ll always have your back,” Roxy says.

Eggsy doesn’t know what to say to that. A lump catches in his throat, but he finally manages to choke out, “Thank you.”

“Eggsy, Lancelot,” Merlin calls out to them. “We’re coming up on Valentine’s base now, look sharp.”

Said base appears to be situated in the midst of a snow-capped mountain range, and were the hangar opening not directly before them, he’d have no idea what he was looking for. As they get within proximity, his Kingsman glasses light up like fireworks, pinging 60 potential hostiles with anti-aircraft missiles at the ready. “Well, fuck me.”

“Chester!” booms a familiar voice over the comm. “Ain’t this a bit of a surprise? I thought Kingsman had its own resources in place to wait this one out. I hope you haven’t had a change of heart.”

“Actually, Valentine,” Merlin says, “King doesn’t know I’m here.” Which was technically true.

There’s a long moment of silence before Valentine says, “M! What’s this all about? You rethink my offer?”

“I’ve thought about it. I’m open to learning more.” Merlin doesn’t sound particularly enthused, but Eggsy can hear the strain in his voice as he attempts to sound halfway agreeable. “And just to show you I’m serious, I’ve brought something to sweeten the deal, something you’ve been wanting for awhile.”

“Now you’re talking!” Valentine says. “Alright, M. Let’s have ourselves a little sit down, but I'm warning you right now: it'll have to be brief. I’m kinda on a tight schedule, you know?”

“So I’ve heard. Starting landing sequence now,” Merlin signs off, and Eggsy breathes a sigh of relief when his glasses show the anti-aircraft missiles disengaging. “Well,” Merlin says, “We can cross off _getting blown out of the sky_ off the list of ways we could die today.”

“Would you have ever seriously considered it? Going to work for Valentine?”

“Better the devil you know,” Merlin says with a curt shake of his head. “And in spite of myself, I had made friends at Kingsman. I wouldn’t have left them alone there.”

“Was Harry your friend?” Eggsy asks, not entirely sure he would receive an honest answer, or an answer at all.

But Merlin surprises him with his candour, and even more so, the way his eyes dim as he busies himself with various switches on the plane’s control panel. “Yes. Yes, he was a very good friend.”

Merlin skillfully touches down the jet on the long strip afforded to them with barely a shudder. The hanger itself is a massive cave carved out of the mountain, and Eggsy can only imagine how deep the rest of the bunker goes. “Jesus. What’s with the evil villain lair?”

“And what would you do with all that money?”

“Well, I’d start with something more modest,” Eggsy says. “Like an Xbox.”

Roxy is waiting for them by the door when they emerge from the cockpit, every ounce the Kingsman agent in her perfectly fitted suit. “Ready?” she asks them before saying directly to Eggsy, “Remember, you have this.”

“ _We_ have this,” Eggsy says, giving her the nod.

The door opens outward, transforming into stairs. Roxy marches down first, followed by Merlin, while Eggsy brings up the rear. It seems they are to get the red carpet treatment: Valentine himself waits for them at the bottom, clad in a surprisingly restrained black jacket over a white button down and jeans.

“Welcome, welcome!” he says, grinning widely and giving Roxy a particularly pleased look. “I’m glad you all could make it to the party. Mi casa es su casa. You must be Lancelot, and Eggsy, no hard feelings, right?...Or should I say, Galahad?”

It takes a monumental effort to keep his hands at his sides when all Eggsy wants to do is reach out and strangle Valentine, and he manages, if barely.

“Now, you understand we got a strict no-weapons policy here, so if you’ll just….” Valentine says, waving at his waiting assistant, the same woman from the recording of the conference they had watched seemingly ages ago, who now steps forward wielding a hand-sized metal detector.

“Certainly,” Merlin says, giving Roxy and Eggsy a pointed stare as to say _Submit_.

They both raise their arms and allow themselves to be pat down. They weren’t stupid enough to bring their Kingsman guns, but Valentine catches them off-guard by saying, “I’ve been around Kingsman long enough to know what little toys you favour. Confiscate all accessories.”

There goes their rings, lighters, and glasses, just about all of the offencive weapons they had on their persons. For the first time since he had proposed this whole mad idea, Eggsy sees Roxy look less than wholly confident with the situation.

Once they're deemed adequately defanged, Valentine is all grins again. “Let’s have that talk now, M. To my office?”

They are led through a labyrinth of tunnels that all look the same, are set in no noticeable grid pattern, and would be difficult as fuck to navigate later. There are several doors, too many, and the clamour of banging and shouting by angry people who clearly are being kept behind them without their consent is disconcerting.

At last, Valentine leads them into an expansive atrium that could have stood in for the setting of any esoterically themed club. It’s packed with people, many faces even vaguely recognisable, with the collective scent wafting off them screaming, loudly, Wealthy and Important.

Valentine get all sorts of congratulations and becoming smiles as they wind their way through the crowd, Eggsy, Roxy, and Merlin trailing behind him like his personal entourage. They simper for Valentine, praise him like he’s a god, but then again, considering what Valentine is about to do, he might as well be. It’s all Eggsy can do but sneer at them behind Valentine’s back. Roxy reaches out and grabs his hand in an effort to calm him.

The journey comes to an end when they are led up a nearly camouflaged flight of stairs to a room that must be Valentine’s fishbowl-like command centre that overlooks the crowd below. A large table takes up most of the room that, upon closer examination, reveals itself to be a more like a touch screen monitor, and in the back, further away from prying eyes, is Valentine’s desk with nothing at all on it save for a smaller embedded monitor. Silicon Valley minimalism at its finest.

Gazelle stands by the table, eyeing Eggsy up with a small smirk.

“Gazelle,” Valentine says, “Why don’t we make our guests feel more at home? Anybody need a drink?” When no one responds, Valentine shrugs, leaning against the table. “Alright, down to business, I see. That’s fine. I can be the first to start. I come to this meeting in good faith, M. My offer from before was genuine, so I am _sincerely_ hoping you’re not here under false pretenses with your two little spy clones to try and stop my plans from going into effect.”

While Eggsy struggles not to react, Merlin doesn’t so much as bat an eye. “Not in so many words.”

“Well, here’s why I think you should reconsider if that’s what you’re here to do,” Valentine says before his gaze falls to Eggsy, freezing him in place with a dark, unrelenting stare, “Do you believe in life after death? I do, in the most literal sense. Come with me.”

There’s another door in the command centre that Eggsy hadn’t noticed for having seamlessly blended into the wall until Valentine opened it. They step through into a laboratory reminiscent of any of the ones at Kingsman: clinical and sterile, expensive equipment lined up along the steel tables, but none of it is what draws and holds Eggsy’s attention.

At the centre of it all is another long metal table, and on it is Harry, recognisable by his long limbs still clothed in the telltale Kingsman pinstriped suit because his head has been hidden by a blue paper sheet. There are multi-hued _wires_ running out from beneath that sheet, connected to a seeming wall of computer equipment and monitors, like some bad eighties sci-fi film.

Eggsy makes some inarticulate noise, and Roxy squeezes his hand in a death grip. “What the fuck have you done to him?”

“Let me first start by telling you a story,” Valentine rushes to explain. “About my time working at Kingsman, and what Chester King—you might better know him as Arthur—really envisioned.”

Valentine had always been praised for his charisma, and his full storytelling abilities spark to life as he continues.

“Imagine being nominated to leader over this wealthy, secret, long-running organisation who actually changes the world. Imagine having to send out and watch all your agents die or become horribly maimed by the hard work you’re committed to doing to keep that world safe. Your organisation gets tired of the toll it takes, so it starts working on some alternatives. Robots, maybe, but the right AI is too many years off. How about other humans? But not real humans. Cubic zirconia ones. It works. You can mass manufacture them, have one waiting in the wings in case the other bites it on a mission. The world continues being saved and now no valuable human lives have to be sacrificed to do so.

“Now, imagine seeing all these fit, superior bodies being grown in the lab and sent out into the world to do great things, while, year after year, you grow old and your body becomes feeble. Your mind too. It starts to forget things like your PIN number or your computer password. Alarming, isn’t it? You’ve done so many great things in your life, saved the damn world hundreds of times over, and yet here you are, slowly being defeated by time.”

Valentine pauses, looking each of them in the eye. “Chester thought if we could clone humans, make their bodies the pinnacle of physical perfection, then why can’t we slow down aging? Why can’t we circumvent death all together? That’s what he ultimately sought to achieve. It’s what I worked on. And so you know that I did? I created immortality.”

With a small flourish, Valentine holds up a simple USB drive with all the reverence of someone holding aloft the Holy Grail.

Merlin clears his throat. “I’m afraid you’ll have to elaborate.”

“What are we really? What is it that makes us ourselves? It’s not our bodies. It’s not this sack of flesh and bones. It’s our _minds_. It’s our memories that give us our sense of self,” Valentine says. “Bodies grow old and oxidise and eventually die. That doesn't change. But our minds, who we really are, can live forever. In the digital realm.”

“Digital avatars?” Merlin asks with a note of disbelief. “That’s the key to immortality, is what you’re saying.”

Valentine smiles. “You’re thinking about it too simplistically. Avatars are just a facsimile of the real thing. A shell one still has to pour one’s self into. I’m talking about the actual self. I'm talking about transubstantiation! No one else on earth has the capability to extract every last complex thought and nuanced memory from the human brain to recreate that mind in a manner that perfectly replicates it. No one, until now.”

Valentine waves at Harry's body, the wires, the computers, and Eggsy _understands_. He extricates himself from Roxy’s grip and rushes towards the body before he realises he's even moved, like he means to guard it, maybe to tear it away from Valentine’s clutches, but when he raises his hand, he finds himself hesitant to even touch Harry.

“I admit, Harry was a bit of a challenge, given a sizeable chunk of the brain was, uh, let's just call it damaged during the process,” Valentine continues, watching Eggsy keenly. “But once you fire up those neurons in the right way with a bit of electricity, we got it all in working order again for the transfer.”

And to his surprise, Valentine holds the drive out to him. “This is your Harry now. It’s all there. His whole life, now preserved forever.”

Eggsy can’t help it. He snatches it from Valentine’s hand, clutching it to his chest with a shaking fist.

“That may be impressive,” Merlin says, “But a even millions of ones and zeroes do not a living, breathing human being make.”

“Not yet, they don’t,” Valentine concedes. “But that’s where Kingsman comes in. You’ve got the wetworks. I have the technology. And I’ve already done the hard part. If you can extract the data from one brain, it’s not difficult to download it into another.”

The bodies. Eggsy’s mind flashes to the storage room. All those tanks, all those vacant bodies waiting for a consciousness to fill them up.

“Amazing, right? Imagine you have all your memories, except you get to live in a younger, faster, stronger body. A series of bodies, even, that can always be re-tweaked and perfected, forever. Think of how much knowledge we can now accumulate. We’ll never lose any of it. Now that’s what I call really changing the world. Of course, we can’t just have everybody getting to live forever. There’s got to be some controls in place, and first, we’ve got to get the population down to a manageable level.”

“You’re insane,” Eggsy whispers.

Valentine has the gall to look wounded. “You know, Chester didn’t buy into it either. He was thinking something that could magically reverse the effects of aging so he could keep his body. Thought that anything else wouldn't be the same. His notions of the conscious self are a little too metaphysical, if you ask me, but that’s his loss, isn’t it? He was always narrow-minded.”

“I don’t think there’s question that you’ve done it,” Merlin says. “I believe Eggsy is referring to your willingness to play so cavalierly with life and death.”

“Now that’s rich.” Valentine’s lips twitch as if he can barely hold it together. “Did M ever tell you what they would have done to your Harry once they felt you were good enough on your own? Or what would have happened to all the other clones they got running around out there in the wild once the agent from your generation dies? Kingsman don’t like loose ends, do they?”

No. They don’t. It hurts to think about their final words, but Eggsy can’t help remembering how defeated Harry had seemed. _Inevitable end_. _Stop Mattering. Disposable_.

He knew, Eggsy thinks, staring down at Harry’s lifeless hand. He finally finds the courage to reach out and touch, winding his own fingers through Harry’s, feeling their chilled laxity and...Harry’s signet ring still on his finger, because there had been little need to disarm a dead man.

“See, I give people life,” Valentine says. “I want to make their lives better. With your help on this, we can do great things.”

“We destroyed Kingsman’s research,” Eggsy says, turning to face Valentine once more just to watch the anger slowly crawl across his face. “All of it. Every embryo they created. I believe there won’t be much to work with even if we did agree with what you’re saying.”

It takes a few moments for Valentine to react. He’s more affected, Eggsy thinks, by the wilful destruction of billions of dollars of scientific research than his intended destruction of most of the human race. When manages Valentine to speak again, there’s a newfound coldness there that’s fuelled by that anger, now directed at his guests. “I guess it’s a good thing I now got a viable male and viable female right here.”

“Yeah, see, I can’t say much for this viable male,” Eggsy begins, seeing Roxy shift into a ready stance from the corner of his eye. “But that viable female is gonna destroy you.” Not a bad line in and of itself, but it's made even better by the ring he jabs against Valentine’s neck.

The thing must not have much juice in it left because Valentine jolts back and falls against the wall, but remains conscious, gasping. From behind them, Gazelle releases an outraged cry and comes flying at him, deadly blades flashing, ready to drive one through some vital organ, no doubt.

And she would have done had Roxy not shot her foot into Gazelle’s ribs, sending her careening off course and into a row of delicate glass beakers that shatter on impact. It doesn’t keep her down for long, and soon she and Roxy are at it in fast, furious motion.

It’s enough of a distraction for Merlin to quietly slip out of the room, probably headed for the nearest computer terminal. Good.

“Kick her ass, Gazelle! We don’t need her alive!” Valentine croaks, struggling to stand up again, one shaky hand reaching into his jacket for his gun, which won’t do at all.

Eggsy drives into his middle, shoulders first, throwing them both back to the floor. He hears the surprised “Oof!” forced from Valentine’s lungs as they both wrestle for control of the gun.

“Why can’t you people see,” Valentine grunts, clenching his hand tighter around the gun, “That I’m trying to do some good here?”

“Right now, I don’t give a fuck if you’re curing cancer, bruv,” Eggsy snarls, sending his fist into Valentine’s nose. There’s not a lot of force behind it from this angle, but it stuns Valentine long enough for Eggsy to free the gun from his grip, only to have it knocked clean out of his hand when Gazelle hurls a fucking _microscope_ in his direction. “Fuck! Are you fucking kidding me?” There may even be some broken fingers there. Eggsy flexes his hand and winces as pain shoots up his arm. Definitely broken.

He gets the fright of his life when Gazelle tries to rush him again, but Roxy is there, driving her back. The two are evenly matched in skill and speed, and the close quarters disadvantage Gazelle by limiting her manoeuvrability, giving Roxy more openings to send her careening into another shelf.

“Can we try and not break the expensive, one-of-a-kind equipment?” Valentine cries out, which goes heedless as another machine Eggsy can’t readily identify but is sure had at least a six-figure price tag is sent toppling over.

It also manages to send the gun sliding across the floor back towards them, just out of reach. Valentine and Eggsy both glance at it, then at each other, before throwing themselves bodily towards it in a struggle to be the one to reach it first.

A startled cry cuts through their efforts, and they look up in time to see Gazelle staring down at a seemingly innocuous cut on her arm that really shouldn’t have produced the reaction it did. Except, seconds later, a sickly green tinge starts to spread out from it, travelling up her arm, skittering up the veins in her neck until her eyes roll up in her head and she collapses at Roxy’s feet, one of which has a small blade protruding from the toe.

“Gazelle!” Valentine cries out, this time with a heavy note of alarm and anguish, and Eggsy’s broken fingers scream bloody murder at him as he uses them to extend his reach by a hair’s breath, snatching up the gun and pointing it Valentine, finger automatically sliding over the trigger.

“Hey, there,” Valentine says, eyeing the gun and then Eggsy. “You really got the guts to shoot an unarmed man? You’ve already won. Kill me now and it’s just murder.”

 _Murder_. Eggsy hesitates as the bloodlust coursing through his veins is undercut by the word sinking like a stone in his stomach. He’s already killed Arthur in cold blood, and now he wants to do the very same to Valentine, only torn between ending his life as soon as possible and wanting to watch him bleed out slowly and agonisingly. It wouldn’t even be self-defence, just revenge.

Roxy was right: it _is_ natural to him after all.

He’s so caught up in indecision, he almost misses the way Valentine’s fingers twitch towards something in his inner jacket pocket, and by then it’s too late.

The sharp metal blade of Gazelle’s prostheses is protruding from Valentine’s chest at an upward angle. The abrupt sight of it comes as a shock to them both. The remote control Valentine had been reaching for falls from his hand, clattering uselessly to the floor, whatever it was intended to be used for no longer of consequence.

Valentine stares down at his impalement in perplexity before he starts gagging, and Eggsy only has a few seconds of warning to get out of the way as Valentine spews vomit in his direction before sinking to the floor, revealing a grim Roxy standing behind him, glaring down at him in all her fearsome glory.

“For James,” she spits down at him, raising her gaze to meet Eggsy’s. Eggsy can only nod. “And Harry.”

As Valentine breathes his last, a high-pitched whinge for the unfairness of it all, Eggsy flips the safety back on the gun and lets it fall from his fingers.

It’s over.

As if the thought had been a command, the adrenaline that had been steadily pounding through his system drops off sharply, leaving him utterly exhausted and empty. He staggers back, catching himself on the table, cradling his swelling hand.

“Are you alright?” Roxy asks, the cold fury evaporating from her face and immediately replaced with concern as she rushes over to him. She has a cut on her lip and the abraded skin on her jaw and cheek promise some spectacular bruises later, but other than that, she seems uninjured.

“Yeah, I’m…” He sucks in a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

“I told you I’d have your back,” she says simply.

“And Merlin? He alright?”

“Knowing him? He's probably hacked into, made a copy of, and completely upended Valentine's system by now. But I’ll go check,” she says. “Stay here.”

When Eggsy is alone, he can’t help but be tortuously drawn back to Harry’s body, miraculously undisturbed by the chaotic events that had transpired around it. His good hand automatically moves to the flash drive he had covertly pocketed, making sure it is still there, only able to relax when he can assure himself it's undamaged.

“Always gotta be the hero, even in death, Harry?” Eggsy says, reaching out to splay his hand over Harry’s still chest, breath shakily exhaling, “Thanks for saving me one last time.”

 

_____

 

No one ever talks about the aftermath of these things, and for good reason. There’s a fuckton of cleanup and sorting through messy piles of evidence to send on to the proper authorities. There are people to track down and arrest, including most of the world’s leaders and several very prominent celebrities. There are hostages to rescue and return to their homes. There are bodies to bury. There is an independent spy organisation that needs new management and a new purpose.

There is research to destroy so as to assure it will never fall into the wrong hands.

It’s during this last phase, which is overseeing the disposal of all the spare bodies in Kingsman’s storeroom, that Merlin finds Eggsy, gazing into one tank in particular, face bathed in its serene blue light. The body within it was closest to Harry’s age, perhaps a bit younger, still and silent, like it was merely asleep.

“For all that he was prepared to become a genocidal maniac, a lot of Valentine’s research, especially his work in bio-prosthetics, is actually quite useful,” Merlin says by way of greeting. “If we’re looking to change Kingsman’s course, there are worse places to start. There’s no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

“Mmmm,” Eggsy says, perhaps more in favour of agreement than not. Most of his attention is consumed by the sight before him.

“We could finish it,” Merlin dares to say. “We could see if what Valentine proposed could actually work. We have the research. We have the tech. We could bring him back, Eggsy.”

Eggsy remains quiet for a very long time. His heart leaps at the chance. The prospect of bringing Harry back to life, back to Eggsy, back to a better Kingsman and a better world where he could actually have a chance to be happy, is so very tempting.

So much of him wants to selfishly say yes.

“I don’t think he’d want that,” is what he finally tells Merlin, as much as it makes his chest hurt, as hard as the words are to emerge from his lips. “Death is supposed to be what makes life meaningful. If we lose sight of that, then what does any of it matter?” With visible effort, he turns away from the tank. “He should be left in peace. That’s what he would want.”

Merlin swallows and looks away, clearly disappointed but unable to argue the point, only to have his attention drawn back to what Eggsy holds out to him. The flash drive. What’s left of Harry Hart.

“Destroy it,” Eggsy tells him. His eyes are pleading. _Because I know I won’t be able to_.

Merlin only nods, but still can’t help taking care in the way he holds the disk. It does holds something so very precious.

“No more clones,” Eggsy says firmly. “No more toying with people’s lives. No more playing with life and death.”

It won’t be easy. Too many people have been stuck in the same mindset for too long.

“No more,” Merlin agrees. They'll find a way, even if it means burning the entire thing to the ground.

 

_____

 

The bookstore is decidedly quaint. What it lacks in footprint, modern perks, and selection, it more than makes up for in charm, the ever present scent of bergamot and lemon, and the passion of its owner and sole staff member, George Harrington. One would have to be passionate for it considering the shop’s revenue barely breaks even most years. George makes most of his living copy-editing for various publications.

George is very mild-mannered, by all appearances. He’s in his early fifties, is fond of wearing jumpers and cardigans, and there’s a slight curl to his greying hair. He had never married and has no children. His face is soft. His eyes are warm and kind. He’s quite tall, was probably very gangly in his youth, but now older age has spread itself across his middle, if only slightly.

He’s what Eggsy would imagine Harry would eventually transform into, had he been afforded his peaceful retirement.

“Pardon my interruption, but you’ve been staring at that same shelf for the last ten minutes,” are the first words George says to him, spoken with a small note of amusement and the hint of a baffled smile. “Is there anything I can help you with? If we don’t have it in stock, I’d be happy to put in an order for you.”

Eggsy turns and stares and finds he can’t speak for the lump that’s formed in his throat, the sharp spike of pain that ripples across his chest, stealing his breath away. It’s overwhelming, how very much this man is and isn’t Harry.

This had been such a terrible idea from inception, he had promised his mum he’d be home for dinner tonight besides, but he had gone through with it anyway. He needed to know, to assure himself that Harry's line was safe, to _see_ some reminder of him.

George’s pleasant expression gradually melts into worry. “Are you alright?”

Realising that George is about two seconds from phoning the ambulance to report a person having a stroke, Eggsy opens his mouth and tries to make words happen. “Y-yes. Sorry. Right.” They are not altogether words that bring much comfort in regards to assuring the other of his physical and mental state, but some of the tension at least bleeds from George’s frame. “I was actually...this book. I think I would like this book.”

Before George’s brows can furrow again, Eggsy’s reaches out and grabs the book that had been the focus of his concentration ever since he had stepped into the shop.

“Ah.” Peering at the cover, Eggsy is fortunate enough to witness the look of pleasant surprise that lights up George’s eyes and turns up the corners of his mouth in a small, pleased smile. “This was my favourite story as a child.”

“I’ve never read it,” Eggsy says. “But I’ve been recommended it by a...a dear friend.”

“It’s a good one,” George assures. “If you like stories about….”

Eggsy waits, but when George doesn’t finish, he prompts, “...about?”

“Well, a bit of romance, I suppose. And some very noble ideals,” George says with a hint of bashfulness, and Eggsy is terribly intrigued by the high flush of colour that appears across his cheeks.

“Will you read it to me?” he asks impulsively.

George’s eyes widen. “Beg pardon?”

He feels utterly foolish, but once he’s asked, he suddenly wants nothing more in the world. “Please.”

George studies him. There must be something frail and desperate in his eyes, something teetering on the edge in his demeanour, because he carefully takes the book from Eggsy’s hands and says, “There’s a sofa in the back corner. Perfect for sitting down with a good read. I have...well, no it’s not terribly busy at the moment. I have a few minutes at least.”

It’s an old and musty bit of furniture, but it’s very comfortable, its curves and indentations perfectly conforming to Eggsy’s body and speaking of many who have lied down upon it before in just the same way. George takes up the seat in the adjacent and equally worn-through chair at Eggsy’s feet, and Eggsy finds that even lying down on his side, in his bespoke Kingsman suit no less, he has a perfect view of the way George settles elegantly down into it, crosses his legs quite primly, and unfolds his reading glasses to slip them over his nose. He looks very bookish like that, like all he needs is a pot of tea and some biscuits on the table beside him to be perfectly content with the world. His glasses have thin, metal frames, however, for which Eggsy is glad.

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out of the Wart by rapping his knuckles. She did not rap Kay’s knuckles, because when Kay grew older he would be Sir Kay, the master of the estate….”

Eggsy closes his eyes, letting the words wash over him, pooling in those empty gaping spaces in his heart that constantly ached these days, thawing some of the coldness that had sunk deep into his bones. George’s voice is smooth and confident, naturally falling into a lively storytelling rhythm. He’d do very well with children. Perhaps one day, Eggsy would even bring in Daisy and beg George to read to her. She’d love it.

Presumptive, he knew, but for once it was nice to have something to look forward to.


	11. epilogue

_I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back._

 

_____

 

“Just this last row and that’ll wrap things up here,” Amelia says, typing the last of her notes into her tablet. “I can schedule the incinerators to run tonight.” When she receives no acknowledgement, Amelia looks up at Merlin, whose attention is focused on the life-support chamber directly in front of him. “Merlin?”

Merlin blinks, shakes his head a little and looks at her. “What was that?”

Amelia frowns. “I can dispatch this last batch today, if you’d like.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Merlin says. “You’ve been at this non-stop for the past week. Go on home now and get some rest. I can see to this one.”

She _is_ tired. The sudden organisational changes had left a bureaucratic nightmare in its wake. Whole programmes scrapped. Valuable research sabotaged beyond salvage. A world rocked to learn of its leaders’ betrayal and the fallout that entailed. But. Merlin hardly looks much better, and whereas Amelia had gotten at least three hours of sleep per night over the past month, she had yet to see her superior take so much as a 15-minute kip. “You sure? You could use some rest yourself, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.”

“This is the end of an era,” Merlin says. “It only feels right to see to it personally.”

Sentimental old fool, Amelia thinks fondly, but she understands. As a scientist, it pains her to have to let so much valuable research go. Her life’s work had begun here in these labs, and now she’s not entirely sure what she will do next with the sudden new _limitations_ being imposed from down high. “Alright,” she finally relents and starts to pack up her things. “But do try and go home at some point in the next forty-eight hours.”

“I make no promises,” Merlin calls after her as she heads towards the exit.

With her back turned, he doesn’t get to see the way she rolls her eyes but smiles in exasperation anyhow.

With her back turned, she never sees the way Merlin’s attention returns to the body in the chamber.

Nor does she witness the way his hand retrieves a small USB drive from his pocket and holds it up, pondering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I...yes. Yes that may be a sequel you are sensing.
> 
> Come say hullo to/yell at me at [futuredescending.tumblr.com](http://futuredescending.tumblr.com).


End file.
